
p 






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Blanche Bates edition 



Under Two Flags 

By 

“Ouida”^ 




Illustrated by photographs from life of Miss 
Blanche Bates and other members of her com- 
pany, in “Under Two Flags,” by Byron, Sarony, 
and McIntosh ^ 




A 




New York and Boston 

H. M. Caldwell Company 

Publishers 





“PZ3 



THE LlBRAR v C*- 
CONGRESE* 
TwpCop'.es kece.vpc 

SEP. 27 190? 

Ipoc-VOIGHT ENTRv 

<&iL. *7. ' r fo^ 

CL A X>' No. 

^ *'3 

COPY A 


Copyright , 1902 

By H. M. Caldwell Co. 




































TO 

COLONEL POULETT CAMERON 

C. B., K. C. T. & 8., BTC. 

WHOSE FAMILY 

HAS GIVEN SO MANY BRILLIANT SOLDIERS 
TO THE 

ARMIES OF FRANCE AND ENGLAND 
AND MADE THE BATTLE-FIELDS OF EUROPE RING WITH 

“THE WAR-CRY OF LOCHIEL” 

THIS 

STORY OF A SOLDIER’S LIFE 
IS 

DEDICATED IN SINCERE FRIENDSHIP 


AVIS AU LECTEUR. 


This Story was originally written for a military periodical.. 
It has been fortunate enough to receive much commendation 
from military men, and for them it is now specially issued in 
its present form. Eor the general public it may be as well to 
add that, where translations are appended to the French 
phrases, those translations usually follow the idiomatic and 
particular meaning attached to those expressions in the argot 
of the Army of Algeria, and not the correct or literal one given 
to such words or sentences in ordinary grammatical parlance. 

OUIDA. 






















BLANCHE BATES 







CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER PAGE 


I. 

“Beauty of the Brigades,” 

• 

• 


1 

n. 

The Loose Box, and the Tabagie, . 

• 



14 

hi. 

The Soldiers’ Blue Ribbon, 

• 

• 


25 

IY. 

Love a la Mode, .... 

• 

• 


45 

V. 

Under the Keeper’s Tree, 

• 

• 


59 

VI. 

The End of a Ringing Run, 

• 

• 


67 

VII. 

After a Richmond Dinner, 

• 

• 


77 

VIII. 

A Stag Hunt au Clair de la Lune, 

• 



93 

IX. 

The Painted Bit, .... 

• 



111 

X. 

“ Petite Reine,” .... 




122 

XI. 

For a Woman’s Sake, 

• 

• 


141 

XII. 

The King’s Last Service, . 

• 

• 


160 

XIII. 

In the Cafe of the Chasseurs, 

• 

• 


181 

XIY. 

“ De Profundis ” before “ Plunging,” 

• 

• 


190 

XY. 

“ L’Amie du Drapeau,” 

• 

• 


197 

XVI. 

Cigarette en Bacchante, . 

• 

• 


216 

XVII. 

Under the Houses of Hair, 

• 

• 


232 

XVIII. 

Cigarette en Bienfaitrice, 

• 

• 


254 

XIX. 

The Ivory Squadrons, 

• 

• 


274 

XX. 

Cigarette en Conseil et Cachette, 

• 



284 

XXI. 

Cigarette en Condottiera, 

• 

• 


307 

XXII. 

The Mistress of the White King, 


• 


319 

XXIII. 

The Little Leopard of France, 


• 


339 


V 


VI 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER PAGE 

XXIV. “ Miladi aux Beaux Yeux Bleus,” . . . 362 

XXV. “LeBonZig,” 380 

XXVI. Zaraila 393 

XXVII. The Love of the Amazon, .... 406 

XXVIII. The Leathern Zackrist, 421 

XXIX. By the Bivouac Fire, 431 

XXX. Seul au Monde, 450 

XXXI. “ Je vous Achete votre Vie,” . . . 470 

XXXII. “Venetia,” \ k 481 

XXXIII. The Gift of the Cross, . . . . . 506 

XXXIV. The Desert Hawk and the Paradise Bird, . 523 

XXXV. Ordeal by Fire 540 

XXXVI. The Vengeance of the Little One, . . 546 

XXXVII. In the Midst of Her Army, .... 587 

THE LAST. At Rest, 600 


UNDER TWO FLAGS 


CHAPTER I. 

“BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES.” 

“ I don’t say but what he’s difficult to please with his Tops,” 
said Mr. Rake, factotum to the Hon. Bertie Cecil, of the 1st 
Life Guards, with that article of hunting toggery suspended 
in his right hand as he paused, before going upstairs, to deliver 
his opinions with characteristic weight and vivacity to the stud- 
groom, “ he is uncommon particular about ’em ; and if his 
leathers aint as white as snow he’ll never touch ’em, tho’ as soon 
as the pack come nigh him at Royallieu, the leathers might just 
as well never have been cleaned, them hounds jump about him 
so; old Champion’s at his saddle before you can say Davy Jones. 
Tops are trials, I aint denying that, specially when you’ve jacks, 
and moccasins, and moor boots, and Russia-leather crickets, and 
turf hacks, and Hythe boots, and waterproofs, and all manner 
of varnish things for dress, that none of the boys will do right 
unless you look after ’em yourself. But is it likely that he 
should know what a worry a Top’s complexion is, and how hard 
it is to come right with all the Fast Brown polishing in the 
world? how should he guess what a piece of work it is to get 
’em all of a color, and how like they are to come mottled, and 
how a’most sure they’ll ten to one go off dark just as they’re 
growing yellow, and put you to shame, let you do what you will 
to make ’em cut a shine over the country? How should he 
know? I don’t complain of that; bless you, he never thinks. 
It’s 1 do this, Rake,’ 1 do that ’ ; and he never remembers ’tisn’t 
done by magic. But he’s a true gentleman, Mr. Cecil; never 
grudge a guinea, or a fiver to you ; never out of temper neither, 
always have a kind word for you if you want, thoro’bred every 
inch of him; see him bring down a rocketer, or lift his horse 
over the Broad Water! He’s a gentleman — not like your snobs 
that have nothing sound about ’em but their cash, and swept 


2 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


out their shops before they bought their fine feathers ! — and I’ll 
be d d if I care what I do for him.” 

With which peroration to his born enemy the stud-groom, 
with whom he waged a perpetual and most lively feud, Rake 
flourished the tops that had been under discussion, and trium- 
phant, as he invariably was, ran up the back stairs of his mas- 
ter’s lodgings in Piccadilly, opposite the Green Park, and with 
a rap on the panels entered his master’s bedroom. 

A Guardsman at home is always, if anything, rather more 
luxuriously accommodated than a young Duchess, and Bertie 
Cecil was never behind his fellows in anything ; besides, he was 
one of the cracks of the Household, and women sent him pretty 
things enough to fill the Palais Royal. The dressing-table was 
littered with Bohemian glass and gold-stoppered bottles, and all 
the perfumes of Araby represented by Breidenback and Rimmel. 
The dressing-case was of silver, with the name studded on the 
lid in turquoises; the brushes, bootjack, boot-trees, whip-stands, 
were of ivory and tortoiseshell; a couple of tiger skins were 
on the hearth with a retriever and blue greyhound in possession ; 
above the mantel-piece were crossed swords in all the varieties 
of gilt, gold, silver, ivory, aluminum, chiseled and embossed 
hilts ; and on the walls were a few perfect F rench pictures, with 
the portraits of a greyhound drawn by Landseer, of a steeple- 
chaser by Harry Hall, one or two of Herring’s hunters, and 
two or three fair women in crayons. The hangings of the room 
were silken and rose-colored, and a delicious confusion pre- 
vailed through it pell-mell; box-spurs, hunting-stirrups, car- 
tridge cases, curb-chains, muzzle-loaders, hunting flasks, and 
white gauntlets, being mixed up with Paris novels, pink notes, 
point-lace ties, bracelets, and bouquets to be dispatched to vari- 
ous destinations, and velvet and silk bags for banknotes, cigars, 
or vesuvians, embroidered by feminine fingers and as useless 
as those pretty fingers themselves. On the softest of sofas, half 
dressed, and having half an hour before splashed like a water 
dog out of the bath, as big as a small pond, in the dressing- 
chamber beyond, was the Hon. Bertie himself, second son of 
Viscount Royallieu, known generally in the Brigades as 
“ Beauty.” The appellative, gained at Eton, was in no way 
undeserved; when the smoke cleared away that was circling 
round him out of a great meerschaum bowl, it showed a face 
of as much delicacy and brilliancy as a woman’s; handsome, 
thoroughbred, languid, nonchalant, with a certain latent reckless- 


U BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES.” 3 

ness under the impassive calm of habit, and a singular softness 
given to the large, dark hazel eyes by the unusual length of the 
lashes over them. His features were exceedingly fair — fair as 
the fairest girl’s; his hair was of the softest, silkiest, brightest 
chestnut ; his mouth very beautifully shaped ; on the whole, with 
a certain gentle, mournful love-me look that his eyes had with 
them, it was no wonder that great ladies and gay lionnes alike 
gave him the palm as the handsomest man in all the Household 
Regiments — not even excepting that splendid golden-haired Co- 
lossus, his oldest friend and closest comrade, known as “ the 
Seraph.” 

He looked at the new tops that Rake swung in his hand, and 
shook his head. 

“ Better, Rake ; but not right yet. Can’t you get that tawny 
color in the tiger’s skin there? You go so much to brown.” 

Rake shook his head in turn, as he set down the incorrigible 
tops beside six pairs of their fellows, and six times six of every 
other sort of boots that the covert side, the heather, the flat, 
or the “ sweet shady side of Pall Mall ” ever knew. 

“Do my best, sir; but Polish don’t come nigh Mature, Mr. 
Cecil.” 

“ Goes beyond it, the ladies say; and to do them justice they 
favor it much the most,” laughed Cecil to himself, floating fresh 
clouds of Turkish about him. “ Willon up? ” 

“ Yes, sir. Come in this minute for orders.” 

“How’d Forest King stand the train? ” 

“ Bright as a bird, sir ; he never mind nothing. Mother o’ 
Pearl she worreted a little, he says; she always do, along of 
the engine noise; but the King walked in and out just as if 
the stations were his own stable-yard.” 

“ He gave them gruel and chilled water after the shaking 
before he let them go to their corn ? ” 

“ He says he did, sir.” 

Rake would by no means take upon himself to warrant the 
veracity of his sworn foe, the stud-groom ; unremitting feud was 
between them ; Rake considered that he knew more about 
horses than any other man living, and the other functionary 
proportionately resented back his knowledge and his interfer- 
ence, as utterly out of place in a body-servant. 

“ Tell him I’ll look in at the stable after duty and see the 
screws are all right; and that he’s to be ready to go down with 
them by my train to-morrow — noon, you know. Send that note 


4 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


there, and the bracelets, to St. John’s Wood: and that white 
bouquet to Mrs. Delamaine. Bid Willon get some Banbury 
bits; I prefer the revolving mouths, and some of Wood’s double 
mouths and Nelson gags; we want new ones. Mind that lever- 
snap breech-loader comes home in time. Look in at the Com- 
mission stables, and if you see a likely black charger as good 
as Black Douglas, tell me. Write about the stud fox-terrier, 
and buy the blue Dandy Dinmont; Lady Guinevere wants him. 
I’ll take him down with me. But first put me into harness. 
Rake; it’s getting late.” 

Murmuring which multiplicity of directions, for Rake to catch 
as he could, in the softest and sleepiest of tones, Bertie Cecil 
drank a glass of Curagoa, put his tall, lithe limbs indolently off 
his sofa, and surrendered himself to the martyrdom of cuirass 
and gorget, standing six feet one without his spurred jacks, but 
light-built and full of grace as a deer, or his weight would not 
have been what it was in gentleman-rider races from the Hunt 
steeple-chase at La Marche to the Grand National in the 
Shires. 

“ As if Parliament couldn’t meet without dragging us 
through the dust ! The idiots write about ‘ the swells in the 
Guards,’ as if we had all fun and no work, and knew nothing 
of the rough of the Service. I should like to learn what they 
call sitting motionless in your saddle through half a day, while 
T ondon mob goes mad round you, and lost dogs snap at your 
charger’s nose, and dirty little beggars squeeze against your 
legs, and the sun broils you, or the fog Soaks you, and you sit 
sentinel over a gingerbread coach till you’re deaf with the 
noise, and blind with the dust, and sick with the crowd, and half 
dead for want of sodas and brandies, and from going a whole 
morning without one cigarette! not to mention the inevitable 
apple-woman who invariably entangles herself between your 
horse’s legs, and the certainty of your riding down somebody 
and having a summons about it the next day! If all that isn’t 
the rough of the Service, I should like to know what is. Why, 
the hottest day in the batteries, or the sharpest rush into Ghoor- 
khas or Bhoteahs, would be light work, compared ! ” murmured 
Cecil with the most plaintive pity for the hardships of life in 
the Household, while Rake, with the rapid proficiency of long 
habit, braced and buckled and buttoned, knotted the sash with 
the knack of professional genius, girt on the brightest of all 
glittering polished silver steel “ Cut-and-Thrusts,” with its rich 


5 


“beauty of the brigades.” 

gilt mountings, and contemplated with flattering self-com- 
placency leathers white as snow, jacks brilliant as black varnish 
could make them, and silver spurs of glittering radiance, until 
his master stood full harnessed, at length, as gallant a Life 
Guardsman as ever did duty at the Palace by making love to 
the handsomest lady-in-waiting. 

“To sit wedged in with one’s troop for five hours, and in a 
drizzle too! Houses oughtn’t to meet until the day’s fine; I’m 
sure they are in no hurry,” said Cecil to himself, as he pocketed 
a dainty, filmy handkerchief, all perfume, point, and embroid- 
ery, with the interlaced B. C., and the crest on the corner, while 
he looked hopelessly out of the window. He was perfectly happy, 
drenched to the skin on the moors after a royal, or in a fast 
thing with the Melton men from Thorpe Trussels to Ranks- 
borough; but three drops of rain when on duty were a totally 
different matter, to be resented with any amount of dandy’s 
lamentations and epicurean diatribes. 

“ Ah, young one, how are you ? Is the day very bad ? ” he 
asked with languid wistfulness as the door opened. 

But indifferent and weary — on account of the weather — as the 
tone was, his eyes rested with a kindly, cordial light on the new- 
comer, a young fellow of scarcely twenty, like himself in fea- 
ture, though much smaller and slighter in build ; a graceful boy 
enough, with no fault in his face, except a certain weakness in 
the mouth, just shadowed only, as yet, with down. 

A celebrity, the Zu-Zu, the last coryphee whom Bertie had 
translated from a sphere of garret bread-and-cheese to a 
sphere of villa champagne and chicken (and who, of course, in 
proportion to the previous scarcity of her bread-and-cheese, grew 
immediately intolerant of any wine less than 90s the dozen), 
said that Cecil cared for nothing longer than a fortnight, unless 
it were his horse, Forest King. It was very ungrateful in the 
Zu-Zu, since he cared for her at the least a whole quarter, pay- 
ing for his fidelity at the tune of a hundred a month ; and, also, 
it was not true, for, besides Forest King, he loved his young 
brother Berkeley — which, however, she neither knew nor 
guessed. 

“ Beastly ! ” replied that young gentleman, in reference to 
the weather, which was indeed pretty tolerable for an Eng- 
lish morning in February. “I say, Bertie — are you in a 
hurry ? ” 

“ The very deuce of a hurry, little one ; why ? ” Bertie never 


6 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


was in a hurry, however, and he said this as lazily as possible, 
shaking the white horsehair over his helmet, and drawing in 
deep draughts of Turkish Latakia previous to parting with his 
pipe for the whole of four or five hours. 

“ Because I am in a hole — no end of a hole — and I thought 
you’d help me,” murmured the boy, half penitently, half caress- 
ingly; he was very girlish in his face and his ways. On which 
confession Rake retired into the bathroom; he could hear just 
as well there, and a sense of decorum made him withdraw, 
though his presence would have been wholly forgotten by them. 
In something the same spirit as the French countess accounted 
for her employing her valet to bring her her chocolate in bed — 
“ Est ce que vous appelez cette chose-la un homme ? ” — Bertie 
had, on occasion, so wholly regarded servants as necessary fur- 
niture that he had gone through a love scene, with that hand- 
some coquette Lady Regalia, totally oblivious of the presence 
of the groom of the chambers, and the possibility of that per- 
son’s appearance in the witness-box of the Divorce Court. It 
was in no way his passion that blinded him — he did not put 
the steam on like that, and never went in for any disturbing 
emotion — it was simply habit, and forgetfulness that those 
functionaries were not born mute, deaf, and sightless. 

He tossed some essence over his hands, and drew on his 
gauntlets. 

“ What’s up. Berk ? ” 

The boy hung his head, and played a little uneasily with an 
ormolu terrier-pot, upsetting half the tobacco in it; he was 
trained to his brother’s nonchalant, impenetrable school, and 
used to his brother’s set; a cool, listless, reckless, thoroughbred, 
and impassive set, whose first canon was that you must lose your 
last thousand in the world without giving a sign that you 
winced, and must win half a million without showing that you 
were gratified; but he had something of girlish weakness in his^ 
nature, and a reserve in his temperament that was with diffi- 
culty conquered. 

Bertie looked at him, and laid his hand gently on the young 
one’s shoulder. 

“ Come, my boy ; out with it ! It’s nothing very bad. I’ll be 
bound ! ” 

“ I want some more money ; a couple of ponies,” said the boy 
a little huskily; he did not meet his brother’s eyes that were 
looking straight down on him. 


“ BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES.” 7 

Cecil gave a long, low whistle, and drew a meditative whiff 
from his meerschaum. 

“ Tres cher, you’re always wanting money. So am I. So is 
everybody. The normal state of man is to want money. Two 
ponies. What’s it for ? ” 

“ I lost it at chicken-hazard last night. Poulteney lent it 
me, and I told him I would send it him in the morning. The 
ponies were gone before I thought of it, Bertie, and I haven’t 
a notion where to get them to pay him again.” 

“ Heavy stakes, young one, for you,” murmured Cecil, while 
his hand dropped from the boy’s shoulder, and a shadow of 
gravity passed over his face; money was very scarce with him- 
self. Berkeley gave him a hurried, appealing glance. He was 
used to shift all his anxieties on to his elder brother, and to be 
helped by him under any difficulty. Cecil never allotted two 
seconds’ thought to his own embarrassments, but he would 
multiply them tenfold by taking other people’s on him as well, 
with an unremitting and thoughtless good nature. 

“ I couldn’t help it,” pleaded the lad, with coaxing and almost 
piteous apology. “ I backed Grosvenor’s play, and you know 
he’s always the most wonderful luck in the world. I couldn’t 
tell he’d go a crowner and have such cards as he had. How 
shall I get the money, Bertie ? I daren’t ask the governor ; and 
besides I told Poulteney he should have it this morning. What 
do you think if I sold the mare? But then I couldn’t sell her 
in a minute ” 

Cecil laughed a little, but his eyes, as they rested on the lad’s 
young, fair, womanish face, were very gentle under the long 
shade of their lashes. 

“ Sell the mare! Nonsense! How should anybody live with- 
out a hack? I can pull you through, I dare say. Ah! by 
George, there’s the quarters chiming. I shall be too late, as I 
live.” 

Not hurried still, however, even by that near prospect, he 
sauntered to his dressing-table, took up one of the pretty velvet 
and gold-filigreed absurdities, and shook out all the banknotes 
there were in it. There were fives and ten enough to count up 
£45. He reached over and caught up a five from a little heap 
lying loose on a novel of Hu Terrail’s, and tossed the whole 
across the room to the boy. 

“ There you are, young one ! But don’t borrow of any but 
your own people again, Berk. We don’t do that. No, no! — 


8 


UNDER TWO FLAGS 4 . 


no thanks ! Shut up all that. If ever you get in a hole, I’ll take 
you out if I can. Good-by — will you go to the Lords? Better 
not — nothing to see, and still less to hear. All stale. That’s 
the only comfort for us — we are outside ! ” he said, with some- 
thing that almost approached hurry in the utterance; so great 
was his terror of anything approaching a scene, and so eager 
was he to escape his brother’s gratitude. The boy had taken 
the notes with delighted thanks indeed, but with that tranquil 
and unprotesting readiness with which spoiled childishness or 
unhesitating selfishness accepts gifts and sacrifices from an- 
other’s generosity, which have been so general that they have 
ceased to have magnitude. As his brother passed him, however, 
he caught his hand a second, and looked up with a mist before 
his eyes, and a flush half of shame, half of gratitude, on his 
face. 

“ What a trump you are ! — how good you are, Bertie ! ” 

Cecil laughed and shrugged his shoulders. 

“ First time I ever heard it, my dear boy,” he answered, as 
he lounged down the staircase, his chains clashing and jingling; 
while, pressing his helmet on to his forehead and pulling the 
chin scale over his mustaches, he sauntered out into the street 
where his charger was waiting. 

“ The deuce ! ” he thought, as he settled himself in his stir- 
rups, while the raw morning wind tossed his white plume hither 
and thither. “ I never remembered ! — I don’t believe I’ve left 
myself money enough to take Willon and Rake and the cattle 
down to the Shires to-morrow. If I shouldn’t have kept enough 
to take my own ticket with! — that would be no end of a sell. 
On my word I don’t know how much there’s left on the dressing- 
table. Well! I can’t help it; Poulteney had to be paid; I can’t 
have Berk’s name show in anything that looks shady.” 

The £50 had been the last remnant of a bill, done under great 
difficulties with a sagacious Jew, and Cecil had no more cer- 
tainty of possessing any more money until next pay-day should 
come round than he had of possessing the moon; lack of ready 
money, moreover, is a serious inconvenience when you belong to 
clubs where “ pounds and fives ” are the lowest points, and live 
with men who take the odds on most events in thousands; but 
the thing was done; he would not have undone it at the boy’s 
loss, if he could; and Cecil, who never was worried by the loss 
of the most stupendous “ crusher,” and who made it a rule never 
to think of disagreeable inevitabilities two minutes together, 


9 


“ BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES.” 

shook his charger’s bridle and cantered down Piccadilly toward 
the barracks, while Black Douglas reared, curveted, made as if 
he would kick, and finally ended by “ passaging ” down half the 
length of the road, to the imminent peril of all passers-by, and 
looking eminently glossy, handsome, stalwart, and foam-flecked, 
while he thus expressed his disapprobation of forming part of 
the escort from Palace to Parliament. 

“ Home Secretary should see about it ; it’s abominable ! If 
we must come among them, they ought to be made a little 
odoriferous first. A couple of fire-engines now, playing on them 
continuously with rose-water and bouquet d’Ess, for an hour 
before we come up, might do a little good. I’ll get some men 
to speak about it in the house ; call it 1 Bill for the Purifying 
of the Unwashed, and Prevention of their Suffocating Her 
Majesty’s Brigades,’ ” murmured Cecil to the Earl of Broceli- 
ande, next him, as they sat down in their saddles with the rest 
of the “ First Life,” in front of St. Stephen’s, with a hazy fog 
steaming round them, and a London mob crushing against their 
chargers’ flanks, while Black Douglass stood like a rock, though 
a butcher’s tray was pressed against his withers, a mongrel was 
snapping at his hocks, and the inevitable apple-woman, of 
Cecil’s prophetic horror, was wildly plunging between his legs, 
as the hydra-headed rushed down in insane, headlong haste to 
stare at, and crush on to, that superb body of Guards. 

“ I would give a kingdom for a soda and brandy. Bah ! ye 
gods! what a smell of fish and fustian,” sighed Bertie, with a 
yawn of utter famine for want of something to drink and some- 
thing to smoke, were it only a glass of brown sherry and a little 
papelito, while he glanced down at the snow-white and jet-black 
masterpieces of Rake’s genius, all smirched, and splashed, and 
smeared. 

He had given fifty pounds away, and scarcely knew whether 
he should have enough to take his ticket next day into the 
Shires, and he owed fifty hundred without having the slightest 
grounds for supposing he should ever be able to pay it, and he 
cared no more about either of these things than he cared about 
the Zu-Zu’s throwing the half -guinea peaches into the river 
after a Richmond dinner, in the effort to hit dragon-flies with 
them; but to be half a day without a cigarette, and to have 
a disagreeable odor of apples and corduroys wafted up to him, 
was a calamity that made him insupportably depressed and 
unhappy. 


10 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


Well, why not? It is the trifles of life that are its bores, after 
all. Most men can meet ruin calmly, for instance, or laugh 
when they lie in a ditch with their own knee-joint and their 
hunter’s spine broken over the double post and rails: it is the 
mud that has choked up your horn just when you wanted to 
rally the pack; it’s the county member who catches you by the 
button in the lobby; it’s the whip who carries you off to a 
division just when you’ve sat down to your turbot ; it’s the ten 
seconds by which you miss the train; it’s the dust that gets in 
your eyes as you go down to Epsom; it’s the pretty little rose 
note that went by accident to your house instead of your club, 
and raised a storm from Madame; it’s the dog that always will 
run wild into the birds ; it’s the cook who always will season the 
white soup wrong — it is these that are the bores of life, and that 
try the temper of your philosophy. 

An acquaintance of mine told me the other day of having lost 
heavy sums through a swindler, with as placid an indifference 
as if he had lost a toothpick ; but he swore like a trooper because 
a thief had stolen the steel-mounted hoof of a dead pet hunter. 

“ Insufferable ! ” murmured Cecil, hiding another yawn be- 
hind his gauntlet ; “ the Line’s nothing half so bad as this ; one 
day in a London mob beats a year’s campaigning ; what’s charg- 
ing a pah to charging an oyster-stall, or a parapet of fascines 
to a bristling row of umbrellas ? ” 

Which question as to the relative hardships of the two Arms 
was a question of military interest never answered, as Cecil 
scattered the umbrellas right and left, and dashed from the 
Houses of Parliament full trot with the rest of the escort on 
the return to the Palace; the afternoon sun breaking out with 
a brightened gleam from the clouds, and flashing off the drawn 
swords, the streaming plumes, the glittering breastplates, the 
gold embroideries, and the fretting chargers. 

But a mere sun -gleam just when the thing was over, and the 
escort was pacing back to Hyde Park barracks, could not con- 
sole Cecil for fog, wind, mud, oyster-vendors, bad odors, and 
the uproar and riff-raff of the streets ; specially when his throat 
was as dry as a lime-kiln, and his longing for the sight of a 
cheroot approaching desperation. Unlimited sodas, three pipes 
smoked silently over t)elphine Demirep’s last novel, a bath well 
dashed with eau de cologne, and some glasses of Anisette after 
the fatigue-duty of unharnessing, restored him a little; but he 
was still weary and depressed into gentler languor than ever 


“ BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES.” 11 

through all the courses at a dinner party at the Austrian Em- 
bassy, and did not recover his dejection at a reception of the 
Duchess of Lydiard-Tregoze, where the prettiest French 
Countess of her time asked him if anything was the matter. 

u les! ” said Bertie with a sigh, and a profound melancholy 
in what the women called his handsome Spanish eyes, “ I have 
had a great misfortune ; we have been on duty all day ! ” 

He did not thoroughly recover tone, light and careless though 
his temper was, till the Zu-Zu, in her diamond-edition of a 
villa, prescribed Creme de Bouzy and Parfait Amour in suc- 
cession, with a considerable amount of pine-apple ice at three 
o’clock in the morning, which restorative prescription succeeded. 

Indeed, it took something as tremendous as divorce from all 
forms of smoking for five hours to make an impression on 
Bertie. He had the most serene insouciance that ever a man 
was blesssed with; in worry he did not believe — he never let 
it come near him; and beyond a little difficulty sometimes in 
separating too many entangled rose-chains caught round him 
at the same time, and the annoyance of a miscalculation on 
the flat, or the ridge-and-furrow, when a Maldon or Danebury 
favorite came nowhere, or his book was wrong for the Grand 
National, Cecil had no cares of any sort or description. 

True, the Royallieu Peerage, one of the most ancient and 
almost one of the most impoverished in the kingdom, could 
ill afford to maintain its sons in the expensive career on which 
it had launched them, and the chief there was to spare usually 
went between the eldest son, a Secretary of Legation in that 
costly and charming City of Vienna, and the young one, 
Berkeley, through the old Viscount’s partiality; so that, had 
Bertie ever gone so far as to study his actual position, he would 
have probably confessed that it was, to say the least, awkward; 
but then he never did this, certainly never did it thoroughly. 
Sometimes he felt himself near the wind when settling-day 
came, or the Jews appeared utterly impracticable; but, as a rule, 
things had always trimmed somehow, and though his debts were 
considerable, and he was literally as penniless as a man can 
be to stay in the Guards at all, he had never in any shape real- 
ized the want of money. He might not be able to raise a guinea 
to go toward that long-standing account, his army tailor’s bill, 
and post obits had long ago forestalled the few hundred a year 
that, under his mother’s settlements, would come to him at the 
Viscount’s death; but Cecil had never known in his life what 


12 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


it was not to have a first-rate stud, not to live as luxuriously as 
a duke, not to order the costliest dinners at the clubs, and be 
among the first to lead all the splendid entertainments and 
extravagances of the Household ; he had never been without his 
Highland shooting, his Baden gaming, his prize-winning 
schooner among the R. V. Y. Squadron, his September battues, 
his Pytchley hunting, his pretty expensive Zu-Zus and other 
toys, his drag for Epsom and his trap and hack for the Park, 
his crowd of engagements through the season, and his bevy of 
fair leaders of the fashion to smile on him, and shower their 
invitation-cards on him, like a rain of rose-leaves, as one of 
their “best men.” 

“ Best,” that is, in the sense of fashion, flirting, waltzing,, 
and general social distinction; in no other sense, for the new- 
est of debutantes knew well that “ Beauty,” though the most 
perfect of flirts, would never be “ serious,” and had nothing to 
be serious with ; on which understanding he was allowed by the 
sex to have the run of their boudoirs and drawing-rooms, much 
as if he were a little lion-dog ; they counted him quite “ safe.” 
He made love to the married women, to be sure ; but he was quite 
certain not to run away with the marriageable daughters. 

Hence, Bertie had never felt the want of all that is bought 
by and represents money, and imbibed a vague, indistinct im- 
pression that all these things that made life pleasant came by 
Nature, and were the natural inheritance and concomitants of 
anybody born in a decent station, and endowed with a tolera- 
ble tact; such a matter-of-fact difficulty as not having gold 
enough to pay for his own and his stud’s transit to the Shires 
had very rarely stared him in the face, and when it did he 
trusted to chance to lift him safely over such a social “ yawner,” 
and rarely trusted in vain. 

According to all the canons of his Order he was never ex- 
cited, never disappointed, never exhilarated, never disturbed; 
and also, of course, never by any chance embarrassed. “ Votre 
imperturbability, ” as the Prince de Ligne used to designate 
La Grande Catherine, would have been an admirable designa- 
tion for Cecil; he was imperturbable under everything; even 
when an heiress, with feet as colossal as her fortune, made him 
a proposal of marriage, and he had to retreat from all the of- 
fered honors and threatened horrors, he courteously, but steadily 
declined them. Nor in more interesting adventures was he less 
happy in his coolness. When my Lord Regalia, who never 


13 


“ BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES.” 

knew when he was not wanted, came in inopportunely in a very 
tender scene of the young Guardsman’s (then but a Cornet) 
with his handsome Countess, Cecil lifted his long lashes lazily, 
turning to him a face of the most plait-il? and innocent de- 
mureness — or consummate impudence, whichever you like. 
“ We’re playing Solitaire. Interesting game. Queer fix, 
though, the ball’s in that’s left all alone in the middle, don’t 
you think ? ” Lord Regalia felt his own similarity to the “ ball 
in a fix ” too keenly to appreciate the interesting character of 
the amusement, or the coolness of the chief performer in it; but 
“ Beauty’s Solitaire ” became a synonym thenceforth among the 
Household to typify any very tender passages “ sotto quartr’ 
occhi.” 

This made his reputation on the town; the ladies called it 
very wicked, but were charmed by the Richelieu-like impudence 
all the same, and petted the sinner; and from then till now 
he had held his own with them; dashing through life very fast, 
as became the first riding man in the Brigades, but enjoying 
it very fully, smoothly, and softly; liking the world and being 
liked by it. 

To be sure, in the background there was always that ogre of 
money, and the beast had a knack of growing bigger and 
darker every year; but then, on the other hand, Cecil never 
looked at him — never thought about him — knew, too, that he 
stood just as much behind the chairs of men whom the world 
accredited as millionaires, and whenever the ogre gave him 
a cold grip, that there was for the moment no escaping, washed 
away the touch of it in a warm, fresh draft of pleasure. 


CHAPTER II. 


THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE . 

“How long before the French can come up? ” asked Welling- 
ton, hearing of the pursuit that was thundering close on his 
rear in the most critical hours of the short, sultry Spanish 
night. “Half an hour, at least,” was the answer. “Very well, 
then I will turn in and get some sleep,” said the Commander- 
in-Chief, rolling himself in a cloak, and lying down in a ditch 
to rest as soundly for the single half hour as any tired drummer- 
boy. 

Serenely as Wellington, another hero slept profoundly, on 
the eve of a great event — of a great contest to be met when 
the day should break — of a critical victory, depending on him 
alone to save the Guards of England from defeat and shame; 
their honor and their hopes rested on his solitary head ; by him 
they would be lost or saved; but, unharassed by the magnitude 
of the stake at issue, unhaunted by the past, unfretted by the 
future, he slumbered the slumber of the just. 

Hot Sir Tristram, Sir Caledore, Sir Launcelot — no, nor 
Arthur himself — was ever truer knight, was ever gentler, braver, 
bolder, more stanch of heart, more loyal of soul, than he to 
whom the glory of the Brigades was trusted now; never was 
there spirit more dauntless and fiery in the field; never temper 
kindlier and more generous with friends and foes. Miles of the 
ridge and furrow, stiff fences of terrible blackthorn, double 
posts and rails, yawners and croppers both, tough as Shire and 
Stewards could make them, awaited him on the morrow; on his 
beautiful lean head capfuls of money were piled by the Service 
and the Talent ; and in his stride all the fame of the Household 
would be centered on the morrow; but he took his rest like the 
cracker he was — standing as though he were on guard, and 
steady as a rock, a hero every inch of him. For he was Forest 
King, the great steeple-chaser, on whom the Guards had laid 
all their money for the Grand Military — the Soldiers’ Blue 
Ribbon. 

His quarters were a loose box; his camp-bed a litter of straw, 

14 


4 


15 


THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE. 

fresh shaken down; his clothing a very handsome rug, hood, 
and quarter-piece buckled on and marked “ B. C. ” ; above the 
manger and the door was lettered his own name in gold, “ For- 
est King ” ; and in the panels of the latter were miniatures of 
his sire and of his dam : Lord of the Isles, one of the greatest 
hunters that the grass countries ever saw sent across them; and 
Bayadere, a wild-pigeon-blue mare of Circassia. How, further- 
more, he stretched up his long line of ancestry by the Sove- 
reign, out of Queen of Roses; by Belted Earl, out of Fallen 
Star; by Marmion, out of Court Coquette, and straight up to 
the White Cockade blood, etc., etc., etc. — is it not written in the 
mighty and immortal chronicle, precious as the Koran, patrician 
as the Peerage, known and beloved to mortals as the “ Stud 
Book ”? 

Not an immensely large, or unusually powerful horse, but 
with race in every line of him; steel-gray in color, darkening 
well at all points, shining and soft as satin, with the firm mus- 
cles quivering beneath at the first touch of excitement to the 
high mettle and finely-strung organization ; the head small, lean, 
racer-like, “ blood ” all over ; with the delicate taper ears, almost 
transparent in full light; well ribbed-up, fine shoulders, ad- 
mirable girth and loins; legs clean, slender, firm, promising 
splendid knee action; sixteen hands high, and up to thirteen 
stone; clever enough for anything, trained to close and open 
country, a perfect brook jumper, a clipper at fencing; taking a 
great deal of riding, as anyone could tell by the set-on of his 
neck, but docile as a child to a well-known hand — such was 
Forest King with his English and Eastern strains, winner at 
Chertsey, Croydon, the National, the Granby, the Belvoir Castle, 
the Curragh, and all the gentleman-rider steeple-chases and 
military sweepstakes in the kingdom, and entered now, with 
tremendous bets on him, for the Gilt Vase. 

It was a crisp, cold night outside ; starry, wintry, but open 
weather, and clear ; the ground would be just right on the mor- 
row, neither hard as the slate of a billiard-table, nor wet as the 
slush of a quagmire. Forest King slept steadily on in his warm 
and spacious box, dreaming doubtless of days of victory, cub- 
hunting in the reedy October woods and pastures, of the ring- 
ing notes of the horn, and the sweet music of the pack, and the 
glorious quick burst up-wind, breasting the icy cold water, and 
showing the way over fence and bullfinch. Dozing and dream- 
ing pleasantly; but alert for all that; for he awoke suddenly. 


16 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


shook himself, had a hilarious roll in the straw, and stood “ at 
attention.” 

Awake only, could you tell the generous and gallant promise 
of his perfect temper; for there are no eyes that speak more 
truly, none on earth that are so beautiful, as the eyes of a horse. 
Forest King’s were dark as a gazelle’s, soft as a woman’s, 
brilliant as stars, a little dreamy and mournful, and as in- 
finitely caressing when he looked at what he loved, as they could 
blaze full of light and fire when danger was near and rivalry 
against him. How loyally such eyes have looked at me over 
the paddock fence, as a wild, happy gallop was suddenly broken 
for a gentle head to be softly pushed against my hand with the 
gentlest of welcomes ! They sadly put to shame the million 
human eyes that so fast learn the lie of the world, and utter it 
as falsely as the lips. 

The steeple-chaser stood alert, every fiber of his body strung 
to pleasurable excitation; the door opened, a hand held him 
some sugar, and the voice he loved best said fondly, “ All right, 
old boy ? ” 

Forest King devoured the beloved dainty with true equine 
unction, rubbed his forehead against his master’s shoulder, and 
pushed his nose into the nearest pocket in search for more of 
his sweetmeat. 

“ You’d eat a sugar-loaf, you dear old rascal. Put the gas 
up, George,” said his owner, while he turned up the body cloth- 
ing to feel the firm, cool skin, loosened one of the bandages, 
passed his hand from thigh to fetlock, and glanced round the 
box to be sure the horse had been well suppered and littered 
down. 

“ Think we shall win, Rake ? ” 

Rake, with a stable lantern in his hand and a forage cap 
on one side of his head, standing a little in advance of a group 
of grooms and helpers, took a bit of straw out of his mouth, 
and smiled a smile of sublime scorn and security. “Win, sir? 
I should be glad to know as when was that ere King ever beat 
yet ; or you either, sir, for that matter ? ” 

Bertie Cecil laughed a little languidly. 

“ Well, we take a good deal of beating, I think, and there 
are not very many who can give it us ; are there, old fellow ? ” 
he said to the horse, as he passed his palm over the withers; 
“ but there are some crushers in the lot to-morrow ; you’ll have 
to do all you know.” 


17 


THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE. 

Forest King caught the manger with his teeth, and kicked 
in a bit of play and ate some more sugar, with much licking 
of his lips to express the nonchalance with which he viewed 
his share in the contest, and his tranquil certainty of being 
first past the flags. His master looked at him once more and 
sauntered out of the box. 

“ He’s in first-rate form, Rake, and right as a trivet.” 

“In course he is, sir; nobody ever laid leg over such cattle 
as all that White Cockade blood, and he’s the very best of the 
strain,” said Rake, as he held up his lantern across the stable- 
yard, that looked doubly dark in the February night after the 
bright gas glare of the box. 

“So he need be,” thought Cecil, as a bull terrier, three or 
four Gordon setters, an Alpine mastiff, and two wiry Skyes 
dashed at their chains, giving tongue in frantic delight at the 
sound of his step, while the hounds echoed the welcome from 
their more distant kennels, and he went slowly across the great 
stone yard, with the end of a huge cheroot glimmering through 
the gloom. “ So he need be, to pull me through. The Ducal and 
the October let me in for it enough; I never was closer in my 
life. The deuce! if I don’t do the distance to-morrow I shan’t 
have sovereigns enough to play pound-points at night ! I don’t 
know what a man’s to do ; if he’s put into this life, he must go 
the pace of it. Why did Royal send me into the Guards, if he 
meant to keep the screw on in this way? He’d better have 
drafted me into a marching regiment at once, if he wanted me 
to live upon nothing.” 

Nothing meant anything under £6000 a year with Cecil, as 
the minimum of monetary necessities in this world, and a look 
of genuine annoyance and trouble, most unusual there, was 
on his face, the picture of carelessness and gentle indifference 
habitually, though shadowed now as he crossed the courtyard 
after his after-midnight visit to his steeple-chaser. He had 
backed Forest King heavily, and stood to win or lose a cracker 
on his own riding on the morrow; and, though he had found 
sufficient to bring him into the Shires, he had barely enough 
lying on his dressing-table, up in the bachelor suite within, 
to pay his groom’s book, or a notion where to get more, if the 
King should find his match over the ridge and furrow in the 
morning ! 

It was not pleasant : a cynical, savage, world-disgusted Timon 
derives on the whole a good amount of satisfaction from his 


18 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


break-down in the fine philippics against his contemporaries 
that it is certain to afford, and the magnificent grievances with 
which it furnishes him ; but when life is very pleasant to a man, 
and the world very fond of him; when existence is perfectly 
smooth, — bar that single pressure of money, — and is an in- 
cessantly changing kaleidoscope of London seasons, Paris win- 
ters, ducal houses in the hunting months, dinners at the Pall 
Mall Clubs, dinners at the Star and Garter, dinners irreproacha- 
ble everywhere; cottage for Ascot week, yachting with the R. 
V. Y. Club, Derby handicaps at Hornsey, pretty chorus-singers 
set up in Bijou villas, dashing rosieres taken over to Baden, 
warm corners in Belvoir, Savernake, and Longeat battues, and 
all the rest of the general programme, with no drawback to it, 
except the duties at the Palace, the heat of a review, or the 
extravagance of a pampered lionne — then to be pulled up in that 
easy, swinging gallop for sheer w r ant of a golden shoe, as one 
may say, is abominably bitter, and requires far more philosophy 
to endure than Timon would ever manage to muster. It is a 
bore, an unmitigated bore; a harsh, hateful, unrelieved martyr- 
dom that the world does not see, and that the world would not 
pity if it did. 

“Never mind! Things will come right. Forest King never 
failed me yet ; he is as full of running as a Derby winner, and 
he’ll go over the yawners like a bird,” thought Cecil, who never 
confronted his troubles with more than sixty seconds’ thought, 
and who was of that light, impassible, half-levity, half -languor 
of temperament that both throws off worry easily and shirks 
it persistently. “ Sufficient for the day,” etc., was the essence 
of his creed ; and if he had enough to lay a fiver at night on the 
rubber, he was quite able to forget for the time that he wanted 
five hundred for settling-day in the morning, and had not an 
idea how to get it. There was not a trace of anxiety on him 
when he opened a low arched door, passed down a corridor, and 
entered the warm, full light of that chamber of liberty, that 
sanctuary of the persecuted, that temple of refuge, thrice 
blessed in all its forms throughout the land, that consecrated 
Mecca of every true believer in the divinity of the meerschaum, 
and the paradise of the nargile — the smoking-room. 

A spacious, easy chamber, too ; lined with the laziest of divans, 
seen just now through a fog of smoke, and tenanted by nearly 
a score of men in every imaginable loose velvet costume, and 
with faces as well known in the Park at six o’clock in May, and 


19 


THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE. 

on the Ileath in October; in Paris in January, and on the 
Solent in August; in Pratt’s of a summer’s night, and on the 
Moors in an autumn morning, as though they were features 
that came round as regularly as the “July” or the Waterloo 
Cup. Some were puffing away in calm, meditative comfort, in 
silence that they would not have broken for any earthly con- 
sideration; others were talking hard and fast, and through the 
air heavily weighted with the varieties of tobacco, from tiny 
cigarettes to giant cheroots, from rough bowls full of caven- 
dish to sybaritic rose-water hookahs, a Babel of sentences rose 
together: “Gave him too much riding, the idiot.” “Take the 
field, bar one.” “ Nothing so good for the mare as a little niter 
and antimony in her mash.” “ Not at all ! the Regent and Rake 
cross in the old strain, always was black-tan with a white frill.” 
“ The Earl’s as good a fellow as Lady Flora ; always give you 
a mount.” “ Nothing like a Kate Terry though, on a bright day, 
for salmon.” “ F aster thing I never knew ; found at twenty 
minutes past eleven, and killed just beyond Longdown Water 
at ten to twelve.” All these various phrases were rushing in 
among each other, and tossed across the eddies of smoke in the 
conflicting tongues loosened in the tabagie and made elo- 
quent, though slightly inarticulate, by pipe-stems; while a tall, 
fair man, with the limbs of a Hercules, the chest of a prize- 
fighter, and the face of a Raphael Angel, known in the House- 
hold as Seraph, was in the full blood of a story of whist played 
under difficulties in the Doncaster express. 

“ I wanted a monkey ; I wanted monkeys awfully,” he was 
stating as Forest King’s owner came into the smoking-room. 

“ Did you. Seraph? The ‘ Zoo ’ or the Clubs could supply you 
with apes fully developed to any amount,” said Bertie, as he 
threw himself down. 

“You be hanged!” laughed the Seraph, known to the rest 
of the world as the Marquis of Rockingham, son of the Duke 
of Lyonnesse. “ I wished monkeys, but the others wished 
ponies and hundreds, so I gave in; Vandebur and I won two 
rubbers, and we’d just begun the third when the train stopped 
with a crash; none of us dropped the cards though, but the 
tricks and the scores all went down with the shaking. 1 Can’t 
play in that row,’ said Charlie, for the women were shrieking 
like mad, and the engine was roaring like my mare Philippa — 
I’m afraid she’ll never be cured, poor thing ! — so I put my head 
out and asked what was up? We’d run into a cattle train. 


20 


UNDER TWO ELAGS. 


Anybody hurt? No, nobody hurt; but we were to get out. ‘ I’ll 
be shot if I get out,’ I told ’em, ‘ till I’ve finished the rubber.’ 

* But you must get out,’ said the guard ; ‘ carriages must be 
moved.’ ‘Nobody says “must” to him,’ said Van (he’d drank 
more Perles du Rhin than was good for him at Doncaster) ; 
‘don’t you know the Seraph?’ Man stared. ‘Yes, sir; know 
the Seraph, sir; leastways, did, sir, afore he died; see him once 
at Moulsey Mill, sir; his “ one two ” was amazin’. Waters soon 
threw up the sponge.’ We were all dying with laughter, and 
I tossed him a tenner. ‘ There, my good fellow,’ said I, ‘ shunt 
the carriage and let us finish the game. If another train come 
up, give it Lord Rockingham’s compliments and say he’ll thank 
it to stop, because collisions shake his trumps together.’ Man 
thought us mad; took tenner though, shunted us to one side 
out of the noise, and we played two rubbers more before they’d 
repaired the damage and sent us on to town.” 

And the Seraph took a long-drawn whiff from his silver 
meerschaum, and then a deep draught of soda and brandy to 
refresh himself after the narrative — biggest, best-tempered, and 
wildest of men in or out of the Service, despite the angelic char- 
acter of his fair-haired head, and blue eyes that looked as clear 
and as innocent as those of a six-year-old child. 

“ Not the first time by a good many that you’ve ‘ shunted off 
the straight,’ Seraph ? ” laughed Cecil, substituting an amber 
mouth-piece for his half -finished cheroot. “ I’ve been having a 
good-night look at the King. He’ll stay.” 

“ Of course he will,” chorused half a dozen voices. 

“ With all our pots on him,” added the Seraph. “ He’s too 
much of a gentleman to put us all up a tree; he knows he car- 
ries the honor of the Household.” 

“ There are some good mounts, there’s no denying that,” said 
Chesterfield of the Blues (who was called Tom for no other 
reason than that it was entirely unlike his real name of 
Adolphus), where he was curled up almost invisible, except for 
the movement of the jasmine stick of his chibouque. “ That 
brute, Day Star, is a splendid fencer, and for a brook jumper, 
it would be hard to beat Wild Geranium, though her shoulders 
are not quite what they ought to be. Montacute, too, can ride 
a good thing, and he’s got one in Pas de Charge.” 

“ I’m not much afraid of Monti, he makes too wild a burst 
first; he never saves one atom,” yawned Cecil, with the coils 
of his hookah bubbling among the rose-water ; “ the man I’m 


21 


THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE. 

afraid of is that fellow from the Tenth; he’s as light as a 
feather and as hard as steel. I watched him yesterday going 
over the water, and the horse he’ll ride for Trelawney is good 
enough to beat even the King if he’s properly piloted.” 

“ You haven’t kept yourself in condition, Beauty,” growled 
“ Tom,” with the chibouque in his mouth, “ else nothing could 
give you the go-by. It’s tempting Providence to go in for the 
Gilt Vase after such a December and January as you spent in 
Paris. Even the week you’ve been in the Shires you haven’t 
trained a bit ; you’ve been waltzing or playing baccarat till five 
in the morning, and taking no end of sodas after to bring you 
right for the meet at nine. If a man will drink champagnes 
and burgundies as you do, and spend his time after women, 
I should like to know how he’s to be in hard riding condition, 
unless he expects a miracle.” 

With which Chesterfield, who weighed fourteen stone himself, 
and was, therefore, out of all but welter-races, and wanted a 
weight-carrier of tremendous power even for them, subsided 
under a heap of velvet and cashmere, and Cecil laughed; lying 
on a divan just under one of the gas branches, the light fell full 
on his handsome face, with its fair hue and its gentle languor 
on which there was not a single trace of the outrecuidance at- 
tributed to him. Both he and the Seraph could lead the wild- 
est life of any men in Europe without looking one shadow more 
worn than the brightest beauty of the season, and could hold 
wassail in riotous rivalry till the sun rose, and then throw them- 
selves into saddle as fresh as if they had been sound asleep all 
night; to keep up with the pack the whole day in a fast burst 
or on a cold scent, or in whatever sport Fortune and the coverts 
gave them, till their second horses wound their way homeward 
through muddy, leafless lanes, when the stars had risen. 

“ Beauty don’t believe in training. No more do I. Never 
would train for anything,” said the Seraph now, pulling the 
long blond mustaches that were not altogether in character 
with his seraphic cognomen. “ If a man can ride, let him. If 
he’s born to the pigskin he’ll be in at the distance safe enough, 
whether he smoke or don’t smoke, drink or don’t drink. As for 
training on raw chops, giving up wine, living like the very 
deuce and all, as if you were in a monastery, and changing 
yourself into a mere bag of bones — it’s utter bosh. You might 
as well be in purgatory; besides, it’s no more credit to win then 
than if you were a professional.” 


22 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ But you must have trained at Christ Church, Rock, for the 
Eight? ” asked another Guardsman, Sir Vere Bellingham; “ Se- 
vere,” as he was christened, chiefly because he was the easiest- 
going giant in existence. 

“ Did I! men came to me; wanted me to join the Eight; cox- 
swain came, awful strict little fellow, docked his men of all 
their fun — took plenty himself though ! Coxswain said I must 
begin to train, do as all his crew did. I threw up my sleeve 
and showed him my arm ; ” and the Seraph stretched out an 
arm magnificent enough for a statue of Milo. “ I said, i There, 
sir, I’ll help you thrash Cambridge, if you like, but train I won’t 
for you or for all the University. I’ve been Captain of the 
Eton Eight ; but I didn’t keep my crew on tea and toast. I fat- 
tened ’em regularly three times a week on venison and cham- 
pagne at Christopher’s. Very happy to feed yours, too, if you 
like; game comes down to me every Friday from the Duke’s 
moors; they look uncommonly as if they wanted it!’ You 
should have seen his face! — fatten the Eight! He didn’t let 
me do that, of course; but he was very glad of my oar in his 
rowlocks, and I helped him beat Cambridge without training 
an hour myself, except so far as rowing hard went.” 

And the Marquis of Rockingham, made thirsty by the recol- 
lection, dipped his fair mustaches into a foaming seltzer. 

“ Quite right, Seraph ! ” said Cecil ; “ when a man comes up 
to the weights, looking like a homunculus, after he’s been 
getting every atom of flesh off him like a jockey, he ought to 
be struck out for the stakes, to my mind. ’Tisn’t a question of 
riding, then, nor yet of pluck, or of management; it’s nothing 
but a question of pounds, and of who can stand the tamest life 
the longest.” 

“Well, beneficial for one’s morals, at any rate,” suggested 
Sir Vere. 

“ Morals be hanged ! ” said Bertie very immorally. “ I’m glad 
you remind us of them, Vere; you’re such a quintessence of 
decorum and respectability yourself! I say — anybody know 
anything of this fellow of the Tenth that’s to ride Trelawney’s 
chestnut ? ” 

“Jimmy Delmar! Oh, yes; I know Jimmy,” answered Lord 
Cosmo Wentworth, of the Scots Fusileers, from the far depths 
of an arm-chair. “Knew him at Aldershot. Fine rider; give 
you a good bit of trouble, Beauty. Hasn’t been in England for 
years; troop been such a while at Calcutta. The Fancy take to 


THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGTE. 23 

him rather; offering very freely on him this morning in the 
village ; and he’s got a rare good thing in the chestnut.” 

“Not a doubt of it. The White Lily blood, out of that Irish 
mare D’Orleans Diamonds, too.” 

“ Never mind ! Tenth won’t beat us. The Household will win 
safe enough, unless Forest King goes and breaks his back over 
Brixworth — eh, Beauty ? ” said the Seraph, who believed de- 
voutly in his comrade, with all the loving loyalty characteristic 
of the House of Lyonnesse, that to monarchs and to friends 
had often cost it very dear. 

“You put your faith in the wrong quarter, Rock; I may fail 
you, he never will,” said Cecil, with ever so slight a dash of 
sadness in his words; the thought crossed him of how boldly, 
how straightly, how gallantly the horse always breasted and 
conquered his difficulties — did he himself deal half so well with 
his own ? 

“Well! you both of you carry all our money and all our 
credit ; so for the fair fame of the Household do ‘ all you know.’ 
I haven’t hedged a shilling, not laid off a farthing, Bertie; I 
stand on you and the King, and nothing else — see what a sub- 
lime faith I have in you.” 

“ I don’t think you’re wise then, Seraph ; the field will be very 
strong,” said Cecil languidly. The answer was indifferent, and 
certainly thankless; but under his drooped lids a glance, frank 
and warm, rested for the moment on the Seraph’s leonine 
strength and Raphaelesque head; it was not his way to say it, 
or to show it, or even much to think it; but in his heart he 
loved his old friend wonderfully well. 

And they talked on of little else than of the great steeple- 
chase of the Service, for the next hour in the Tabak-Parlia- 
ment, while the great clouds of scented smoke circled heavily 
round; making a halo of Turkish above the gold locks of the 
Titanic Seraph, steeping Chesterfield’s velvets in strong odors 
of Cavendish, and drifting a light rose-scented mist over 
Bertie’s long, lithe limbs, light enough and skilled enough to 
disdain all “ training for the weights.” 

“ That’s not the way to be in condition,” growled “ Tom,” 
getting up with a great shake as the clock clanged the strokes 
of five ; they had only returned from a ball three miles off, when 
Cecil had paid his visit to the loose box. Bertie laughed; his 
laugh was like himself — rather languid, but very light-hearted, 
very silvery, very engaging. 


24 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ Sit and smoke till breakfast time if you like, Tom; it won’t 
make any difference to me.” 

But the Smoke Parliament wouldn’t hear of the champion of 
the Household over the ridge and furrow risking the steadi- 
ness of his wrist and the keenness of his eye by any such addi- 
tional tempting of Providence, and went off itself in various 
directions, with good-night iced drinks, yawning considerably 
like most other parliaments after a sitting. 

It was the old family place of the Boyallieu House in which 
he had congregated half the Guardsmen in the Service for the 
great event, and consequently the bachelor chambers in it were 
of the utmost comfort and spaciousness, and when Cecil saun- 
tered into his old quarters, familiar from boyhood, he could not 
have been better off in his own luxurious haunts in Piccadilly. 
Moreover, the first thing that caught his eye was a dainty 
scarlet silk riding jacket broidered in gold and silver, with the 
motto of his house, “ Coeur Vaillant se fait Boyaume,” all cir- 
cled with oak and laurel leaves on the collar. 

It was the work of very fair hands, of very aristocratic hands, 
and he looked at it with a smile. “ Ah, my lady, my lady ! ” he 
thought half aloud, “do you really love me ? Do I really love you ?” 

There was a laugh in his eyes as he asked himself what might 
be termed an interesting question ; then something more earnest 
came over his face, and he stood a second with the pretty costly 
embroideries in his hand, with a smile that was almost tender, 
though it was still much more amused. “ I suppose we do,” 
he concluded at last ; “ at least quite as much as is ever worth 
while. Passions don’t do for the drawing-room, as somebody 
says in i Coningsby ’ ; besides — I would not feel a strong emo- 
tion for the universe. Bad style always, and more detrimental 
to 4 condition,’ as Tom would say, than three bottles of brandy! ” 

He was so little near what he dreaded, at present at least, 
that the scarlet jacket was tossed down again, and gave him 
no dreams of its fair and titled embroideress. He looked out, 
the last thing, at some ominous clouds drifting heavily up be- 
fore the dawn, and the state of the weather, and the chance 
of its being rainy, filled his thoughts, to the utter exclusion 
of the donor of that bright gold-laden dainty gift. “ I hope 
to goodness there won’t be any drenching shower. Forest King 
can stand ground as hard as a slate, but if there’s one thing he’s 
weak in it’s slush ! ” was Bertie’s last conscious thought, as he 
stretched his limbs out and fell sound asleep. 


CHAPTER III. 


THE SOLDIERS’ BLUE RIBBON. 

“ Take the Field bar one.” “ Two to one on Forest King.” 
“ Two to one on Bay Regent.” “ Fourteen to seven on Wild 
Geranium.” “ Seven to two against Brother to Fairy.” “ Three 
to five on Pas de Charge.” “ Nineteen to six on Day Star.” 
“ Take the Field bar one,” rose above the hoarse tumultuous 
roar of the Ring on the clear, crisp, sunny morning that was 
shining on the Shires on the day of the famous steeple-chase. 

The talent had come in great muster from London ; the great 
bookmakers were there with their stentor lungs and their quiet, 
quick entry of thousands; and the din and the turmoil, at the 
tiptop of their height, were more like a gathering on the Heath 
or before the Red House, than the local throngs that usually 
mark steeple-chase meetings, even when they be the Grand 
Military or the Grand National. There were keen excitement 
and heavy stakes on the present event; the betting had never 
stood still a second in Town or the Shires; and even the 
“ knowing ones,” the worshipers of the “ flat ” alone, the pro- 
fessionals who ran down gentlemen races, and the hypercritics 
who affirmed that there is not such a thing as a steeple-chaser 
to be found on earth (since, to be a fencer, a water- jumper, 
and a racer were to attain an equine perfection impossible on 
earth, whatever it may be in “ happy hunting ground ” of im- 
mortality) — even these, one and all of them, came eager to see 
the running for the Gilt Vase. 

For it was known very well that the Guards had backed their 
horse tremendously, and the county laid most of its money on 
him, and the bookmakers were shy of laying off much against 
one of the first cross-country riders of the Service, who had 
landed his mount at the Grand National Handicap, the Billes- 
don Coplow, the Ealing, the Curragh, the Prix du Donjon, the 
Rastatt, and almost every other for which he had entered. Yet, 
despite this, the “ Fancy ” took most to Bay Regent ; they 
thought he would cut the work out; his sire had won the 
Champion Stakes at Doncaster, and the Drawing-room at 

25 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ glorious Goodwood,” and that racing strain through the White 
Lily blood, coupled with a magnificent reputation which he 
brought from Leicestershire as a fencer, found him chief favor 
among the fraternity. 

His jockey, Jimmy Delmar, too, with his bronzed, muscular, 
sinewy frame, his low stature, his light weight, his sunburnt, 
acute face, and a way of carrying his hands as he rode that 
was precisely like Aldcroft’s, looked a hundred times more pro- 
fessional than the brilliance of “ Beauty,” and the reckless dash 
of his well-known way of “ sending the horse along with all he 
had in him,” which was undeniably much more like a fast 
kill over the Melton country, than like a weight-for-age race 
anywhere. “ You see the Service in his stirrups,” said an old 
nobbier who had watched many a trial spin, lying hidden in 
a ditch or a drain; and indisputably you did: Bertie’s riding 
was superb, but it was still the riding of a cavalryman, not of 
a jockey. The mere turn of the foot in the stirrups told it, 
as the old man had the shrewdness to know. 

So the King went down at one time two points in the morn- 
ing betting. 

“Know them flash cracks of the Household,” said Tim Var- 
net, as sharp a little Leg as ever “ got on ” a dark thing, and 
“went halves ” with a jock who consented to rope a favorite at 
the Ducal. “ Them swells, ye see, they give any money for 
blood. They just go by Godolphin heads, and little feet, and 
winners’ strains, and all the rest of it; and so long as they get 
pedigree never look at substance; and their bone comes no 
bigger than a deer’s. Now, it’s force as well as pace that tells 
over a bit of plow; a critter that would win the Derby on the 
flat would knock up over the first spin over the clods; and that 
King’s legs are too light for my fancy, ’andsome as ’tis ondeni- 
able he looks — for a little ’un, as one may say.” 

And Tim Yarnet exactly expressed the dominant mistrust of 
the talent; despite all his race and all his exploits, the King 
was not popular in the King, because he was like his backers — 
“ a swell.” They thought him “ showy — very showy,” “ a picture 
to frame,” “ a luster to look at ” ; but they disbelieved in him, 
almost to a man, as a stayer, and they trusted him scarcely at 
all with their money. 

“It’s plain that he’s ‘ meant,’ though,” thought little Tim, 
who was so used to the “ shady ” in stable matters that he 
could hardly persuade himself that even the Grand Military 


THE SOLDIERS’ BLUE RIBBON. 27 

could be run fair, and would have thought a Guardsman or a 
Hussar only exercised his just privilege as a jockey in “ roping ” 
after selling the race, if so it suited his book. “ He’s ‘ meant,’ 
that’s clear, ’cause the swells have put all their pots on him — 
but if the pots don’t bile over, strike me a loser ! ” a contingency 
he knew he might very well invoke; his investments being in- 
variably so matchlessly arranged that, let what would be 
“ bowled over,” Tim Varnet never could be. 

Whatever the King might prove, however, the Guards, the 
Flower of the Service, must stand or fall by him; they had not 
another horse entered, so complete was the trust that, like the 
Seraph, they put in “ Beauty ” and his gray. But there was 
no doubt as to the tremendousness of the struggle lying before 
him. The running ground covered four miles and a half, and 
had forty- two jumps in it, exclusive of the famous Brixworth: 
half was grassland, and half ridge and furrow ; a lane with very 
awkward double fences laced in and in with the memorable 
blackthorn, a laid hedge with thick growers in it, and many 
another “ teaser,” coupled with the yawning water, made the 
course a severe one; while thirty-two starters of unusual ex- 
cellence gave a good field and promised a close race. Every 
fine bit of steeple-chase blood that was to be found in their 
studs, the Service had brought together for the great event ; and 
if the question could ever be solved, whether it is possible to 
.find a strain that shall combine pace over the flat with the 
heart to stay over an inclosed country, the speed to race with 
the bottom to fence and the force to clear water, it seemed 
likely to be settled now. The Service and the Stable had done 
their uttermost to reach its solution. 

The clock of the course pointed to half -past one ; the saddling 
bell would ring at a quarter to two, for the days were short 
and darkened early; the Stewards were all arrived, except the 
Marquis of Rockingham, and the Ring was in the full rush of 
excitement; some “ getting on” hurriedly to make up for lost 
time ; some “ peppering ” one or other of the favorites hotly ; 
some laying off their moneys in a cold fit of caution; some put- 
ting capfuls on the King, or Bay Regent, or Pas de Charge, 
without hedging a shilling. The London talent, the agents 
from the great commission stables, the local betting men, the 
shrewd wiseacres from the Ridings, all the rest of the brother- 
hood of the Turf were crowding together with the deafening 
shouting common to them which sounds so tumultuous, so in- 


28 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


sane, and so unintelligible to outsiders. Amid them half the 
titled heads of England, all the great names known on the flat, 
and men in the Guards, men in the Rifles, men in the Light 
Cavalry, men in the Heavies, men in the Scots Greys, men in 
the Horse Artillery, men in all the Arms and all the Regiments 
that had sent their first riders to try for the Blue Ribbon, were 
backing their horses with crackers, and jotting down figure 
after figure, with jeweled pencils, in dainty books, taking long 
odds with the fields. Carriages were standing in long lines 
along the course, the stands were filled with almost as bright 
a bevy of fashionable loveliness as the Ducal brings together 
under the park trees of Goodwood; the horses were being led 
into the inclosure for saddling, a brilliant sun shone for the 
nonce on the freshest of February noons; beautiful women 
were fluttering out of their barouches in furs and velvets, wear- 
ing the colors of the jockey they favored, and more predominant 
than any were Cecil’s scarlet and white, only rivaled in promi- 
nence by the azure of the Heavy Cavalry champion, Sir Eyre 
Montacute. A drag with four bays — with fine hunting points 
about them — had dashed up, late of course; the Seraph had 
swung himself from the roller-bolt into the saddle of his hack 
tone of those few rare hacks that are perfect, and combine every 
excellence of pace, bone, and action, under their modest ap- 
pellative), and had cantered off to join the Stewards; while 
Cecil had gone up to a group of ladies in the Grand Stand, as if 
he had no more to do with the morning’s business than they. 
Right in front of that Stand was an artificial bullfinch that 
promised to treat most of the field to a “ purler,” a deep ditch 
dug and filled with water, with two towering blackthorn fences 
on either side of it, as awkward a leap as the most cramped 
country ever showed; some were complaining of it; it was too 
severe, it was unfair, it would break the back of every horse 
sent at it. The other Stewards were not unwilling to have it 
tamed down a little, but the Seraph, generally the easiest of all 
sweet-tempered creatures, refused resolutely to let it be touched. 

“ Look here,” said he confidentially, as he wheeled his hack 
round to the Stand and beckoned Cecil down, “look here, 
Beauty; they’re wanting to alter that teaser, make it less awk- 
ward, you know ; but I wouldn’t because I thought it would look 
as if I lessened it for you, you know. Still it is a cracker and 
no mistake; Brixworth itself is nothing to it, and if you’d like 
it toned down I’ll let them do it ” 


THE SOLDIERS* BLUE RIBBON. 29 

“My dear Seraph, not for worlds! You were quite right 
not to have a thorn taken out. Why, that’s where I shall thrash 
Bay Regent,” said Bertie serenely, as if the winning of the 
stakes had been forecast in his horoscope. 

The Seraph whistled, stroking his mustaches. “ Between 
ourselves, Cecil, that fellow is going up no end. The Talent 
fancy him so ” 

rt Bet them,” said Cecil placidly, with a great cheroot in his 
mouth, lounging into the center of the Ring to hear how the 
betting went on his own mount; perfectly regardless that he 
would keep them waiting at the weights while he dressed. 
Everybody there knew him by name and sight; and eager 
glances followed the tall form of the Guards’ champion as he 
moved through the press, in a loose brown sealskin coat, with 
a little strip of scarlet ribbon round his throat, nodding to this 
peer, taking evens with that, exchanging a whisper with a Duke, 
and squaring his book with a Jew. Murmurs followed about 
him as if he were the horse himself — “ looks in racing form ” 
— “ looks used up to me ” — “ too little hands surely to hold in 
long in a spin ” — “ too much length in the limbs for a light 
weight; bone’s always awfully heavy” — “dark under the eye, 
been going too fast for trainin’ ” — “ a swell all over, but rides 
no end,” with other innumerable contradictory phrases, accord- 
ing as the speaker was “ on ” him or against him, buzzed about 
him from the riff-raff of the Ring, in no way disturbing his 
serene equanimity. 

One man, a big fellow, “ ’ossy ” all over, with the genuine 
sporting cut-away coat, and a superabundance of showy necktie 
and bad jewelry, eyed him curiously, and slightly turned so 
that his back was toward Bertie, as the latter was entering a 
bet with another Guardsman well known on the turf, and 
he himself was taking long odds with little Berk Cecil, the boy 
having betted on his brother’s riding, as though he had the 
Bank of England at his back. Indeed, save that the lad had 
the hereditary Royallieu instinct of extravagance, and, with 
a half thoughtless, half willful improvidence, piled debts and 
difficulties on his rather brainless and boyish head, he had much 
more to depend on than his elder; old Lord Royallieu doted on 
him, spoilt him, and denied him nothing, though himself a 
stern, austere, passionate man, made irascible by ill health, and, 
in his fits of anger, a very terrible personage indeed — no more 
to be conciliated by persuasion than iron is to be bent by the 


30 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


hand;- so terrible that even his pet dreaded him mortally, and 
came to Bertie to get his imprudences and peccadilloes cov- 
ered from the Viscount’s sight. 

Glancing round at this moment as he stood in the Ring, Cecil 
saw the betting man with whom Berkeley was taking long odds 
on the race; he raised his eyebrows, and his face darkened for 
a second, though resuming its habitual listless serenity almost 
immediately. 

“ You remember that case of welshing after the Ebor St. 
Leger, Con ? ” he said in a low tone to the Earl of Constantia, 
with whom he was talking. The Earl nodded assent; everyone 
had heard of it, and a very flagrant case it was. 

“ There’s the fellow,” said Cecil laconically, and strode to- 
ward him with his long, lounging cavalry swing. The man 
turned pallid under his florid skin, and tried to edge imper- 
ceptibly away ; but the density of the throng prevented his mov- 
ing quickly enough to evade Cecil, who stooped his head, and 
said a word in his ear. It was briefly: 

“ Leave the ring.” 

The rascal, half bully, half coward, rallied from the startled 
fear into which his first recognition by the Guardsman (who 
had been the chief witness against him in a very scandalous 
matter at York, and who had warned him that if he ever saw 
him again in the Ring he would have him turned out of it) 
had thrown him, and, relying on insolence and the numbers 
of his fraternity to back him out of it, stood his ground. 

“ I’ve as much right here as you swells,” he said, with a 
hoarse laugh. “ Are you the whole Jockey Club, that you come 
it to a honest gentleman like that ? ” 

Cecil looked down on him slightly amused, immeasurably dis- 
gusted — of all earth’s terrors, there was not one so great for 
him as a scene, and the eager bloodshot eyes of the Ring were 
turning on them by the thousand, and the loud shouting of the 
bookmakers was thundering out, “ What’s up ? ” 

“ My ‘ honest gentleman,’ ” he said wearily, “ leave this. I 
tell you ; do you hear ? ” 

“ Make me ! ” retorted the “ welsher,” defiant in his stout- 
built square strength, and ready to brazen the matter out. 
“ Make me, my cock o’ fine feathers ! Put me out of the ring 
if you can, Mr. Dainty Limbs! I’ve as much business here 
as you.” 

The words were hardly out of his mouth before, light as a 


THE SOLDIERS 7 BLUE RIBBON. 


31 


deer and close as steel, Cecil’s hand was on his collar, and 
without any seeming effort, without the slightest passion, he 
calmly lifted him off the ground, as though he were a terrier, 
and thrust him through the throng; Ben Davis, as the welsher 
was named, meantime being so amazed at such unlooked-for 
might in the grasp of the gentlest, idlest, most gracefully made, 
and indolently tempered of his born foes and prey, “ the swells,” 
that he let himself be forced along backward in sheer passive 
paralysis of astonishment, while Bertie, profoundly insensible 
to the tumult that began to rise and roar about him, from those 
who were not too absorbed in the business of the morning to 
note what took place, thrust him along in the single clasp of his 
right hand outward to where the running ground swept past 
the Stand, and threw him lightly, easily, just as one may throw 
a lap-dog to take his bath, into the artificial ditch filled with 
water that the Seraph had pointed out as “ a teaser.” The man 
fell unhurt, unbruised, so gently was he dropped on his back 
among the muddy, chilly water, and the overhanging brambles ; 
and, as he rose from the ducking, a shudder of ferocious and 
filthy oaths poured from his lips, increased tenfold by the up- 
roarious laughter of the crowd, who knew him as “ a welsher,” 
and thought him only too well served. 

Policemen rushed in at all points, rural and metropolitan, 
breathless, austere, and, of course, too late. Bertie turned to 
them, with a slight wave of his hand, to sign them away. 

“ Don’t trouble yourselves ! It’s nothing you could interfere 
in; take care that person does not come into the betting ring 
again, that’s all.” 

The Seraph, Lord Constantia, Wentworth, and many others 
of his set, catching sight of the turmoil and of “ Beauty,” with 
the great square-set figure of Ben Davis pressed before him 
through the mob, forced their way up as quickly as they could ; 
but before they reached the spot Cecil was sauntering back to 
meet them, cool and listless, and a little bored with so much 
exertion; his cheroot in his mouth, and his ear serenely deaf 
to the clamor about the ditch. 

He looked apologetically at the Seraph and the others; he 
felt some apology was required for having so far wandered 
from all the canons of his Order as to have approached “ a 
row,” and run the risk of a scene. 

“ Turf must be cleared of these scamps, you see,” he said, 
with a half sigh. “Law can’t do anything. Fellow was trying 


32 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


to ‘ get on ’ with the young one, too. Don’t bet with those riff- 
raff, Berk. The great bookmakers will make you dead money, 
and the little Legs will do worse to you.” 

The boy hung his head, but looked sulky rather than thankful 
for his brother’s interference with himself and the welsher. 

“ You have done the Turf a service, Beauty— a very great 
service; there’s no doubt about that,” said the Seraph. “Law 
can’t do anything, as you say; opinion must clear the ring of 
such rascals ; a welsher ought not to dare to show his face here ; 
but, at the same time, you oughtn’t to have gone unsteadying 
your muscle, and risking the firmness of your hand at such a 
minute as this, with pitching that fellow over. Why couldn’t 
you wait till afterward ? or have let me do it ? ” 

“ My dear Seraph,” murmured Bertie languidly, “ I’ve gone 
in to-day for exertion ; a little more or less is nothing. Besides, 
welshers are slippery dogs* you know.” 

He did not add that it was having seen Ben Davis taking 
odds with his young brother which had spurred him to such 
instantaneous action with that disreputable personage ; who, be- 
yond doubt, only received a tithe part of his deserts, and mer- 
ited to be double-thonged off every course in the kingdom. 

Rake at that instant darted, panting like a hot retriever, out 
of the throng. “ Mr. Cecil, sir, will you please come to the 
weights — the saddling bell’s a-going to ring, and ” 

“Tell them to wait for me; I shall only be twenty minutes 
dressing,” said Cecil quietly, regardless that the time at which 
the horses should have been at the starting-post was then clang- 
ing from the clock within the Grand Stand. Did you ever 
go to a gentleman-rider race where the jocks were not at least 
an hour behind time, and considered themselves, on the whole, 
very tolerably punctual? At last, however, he sauntered into 
the dressing-shed, and was aided by Rake into tops that had at 
length achieved a spotless triumph, and the scarlet gold-em- 
broidered jacket of his fair friend’s art, with white hoops and 
the “ Cceur Vaillant se fait Royaume” on the collar, and the 
white, gleaming sash to be worn across it, fringed by the same 
fair hands with silver. 

Meanwhile the “ welsher,” driven off the course by a hooting 
and indignant crowd, shaking the water from his clothes, with 
bitter oaths, and livid with a deadly passion at his exile from 
the harvest-field of his lawless gleanings, went his way, with 
a savage vow of vengeance against the “ d d dandy,” the 


THE SOLDIERS 7 BLUE RIBBON. 33 

i( Guards’ swell,” who had shown him up before the world as 
the scoundrel he was. 

The bell was clanging and clashing passionately, as Cecil 
at last went down to the weights, all his friends of the House- 
hold about him, and all standing “ crushers ” on their cham- 
pion, for their stringent esprit de corps was involved, and the 
Guards are never backward in putting their gold down, as all 
the world knows. In the inclosure, the cynosure of devouring 
eyes, stood the King, with the sangfroid of a superb gentle- 
man, amid the clamor raging round him, one delicate ear laid 
back now and then, but otherwise indifferent to the din; with 
his coat glistening like satin, the beautiful tracery of vein and 
muscle, like the veins of vine-leaves, standing out on the glossy, 
clear-carved neck that had the arch of Circassia, and his dark, 
antelope eyes gazing with a gentle, pensive earnestness on the 
shouting crowd. 

His rivals, too, were beyond par in fitness and in condition, 
and there were magnificent animals among them. Bay Regent 
was a huge raking chestnut, upward of sixteen hands, and 
enormously powerful, with very fine shoulders, and an all-over- 
like-going head; he belonged to a Colonel in the Rifles, but 
was to be ridden by Jimmy Delmar of the 10th Lancers, whose 
colors were violet with orange hoops. Montacute’s horse, Pas 
de Charge, which carried all the money of the Heavy Cavalry,— 
Montacute himself being in the Dragoon Guards, — was of much 
the same order; a black hunter with racing-blood in his loins 
and withers that assured any amount of force, and no fault but 
that of a rather coarse head, traceable to a slur on his ’scutcheon 
on the distaff side from a plebeian great-grandmother, who had 
been a cart mare, the only stain in his otherwise faultless pedi- 
gree. However, she had given him her massive shoulders, so 
that he was in some sense a gainer by her, after all. Wild 
Geranium was a beautiful creature enough: a bright bay Irish 
mare, with that rich red gloss that is like the glow of a horse 
chestnut; very perfect in shape, though a trifle light perhaps, 
and with not quite strength enough in neck or barrel; she 
would jump the fences of her own paddock half a dozen times 
a day for sheer amusement, and was game for anything.* She 

* The portrait of this lady is that of a very esteemed young Irish beauty of 
my acquaintance ; she this season did seventy-six miles on a warm June day, 
and ate her corn and tares afterward as if nothing had happened. She is 
six years old. 


34 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


was entered by Cartouche of the Enniskillens, to be ridden by 
“ Baby Grafton,” of the same corps, a feather-weight, and quite 
a boy, but with plenty of science in him. These were the three 
favorites; Day Star ran them close, the property of Durham 
Vavassour, of the Scots Greys, and to be ridden by his owner; 
a handsome, flea-bitten, gray sixteen-hander, with ragged hips, 
and action that looked a trifle string-halty, but noble shoulders, 
and great force in the loins and withers; the rest of the field, 
though unusually excellent, did not find so many “ sweet 
voices” for them, and were not so much to be feared; each 
starter was, of course, much backed by his party, but the bet- 
ting was tolerably even on these four — all famous steeple-chasers' 
— the King at one time, and Bay Regent at another, slightly 
leading in the Ring. 

Thirty-two starters were hoisted up on the telegraph board, 
and as the field got at last under weigh, uncommonly hand- 
some they looked, while the silk jackets of all the colors of the 
rainbow glittered in the bright noon-sun. As Forest King 
closed in, perfectly tranquil still, but beginning to glow and 
quiver all over with excitement, knowing as well as his rider 
the work that was before him, and longing for it in every mus- 
cle and every limb, while his eyes flashed fire as he pulled at the 
curb and tossed his head aloft, there went up a general shout of 
“ Favorite ! ” His beauty told on the populace, and even some- 
what on the professionals, though the legs kept a strong busi- 
ness prejudice against the working powers of “ the Guards’ 
crack.” The ladies began to lay dozens in gloves on him; not 
altogether for his points, which, perhaps, they hardly appre- 
ciated, but for his owner and rider, who, in the scarlet and 
gold, with the white sash across his chest, and a look of serene 
indifference on his face, they considered the handsomest man 
of the field. The Household is usually safe to win the suffrages 
of the sex. 

In the throng on the course Rake instantly bonneted an 
audacious dealer who had ventured to consider that Forest 
King was “ light and curby in the ’ock.” “ You’re a wise ’un, 
you are ! ” retorted the wrathful and ever-eloquent Rake ; 
“ there’s more strength in his clean flat legs, bless him ! than in 
all the round, thick, mill-posts of your halfbreds, that have no 
more tendon than a bit of wood, and are just as flabby as a 
sponge ! ” Which hit the dealer home just as his hat was hit over 
his eyes; Rake’s arguments being unquestionable in their force. 


THE SOLDIERS 7 BLUE RIBBON. 35 

The thoroughbreds pulled and fretted and swerved in their 
impatience; one or two overcontumacious bolted incontinently, 
others put their heads between their knees in the endeavor to 
draw their riders over their withers; Wild Geranium reared 
straight upright, fidgeted all over with longing to be off, pas- 
saged with the prettiest, wickedest grace in the world, and 
would have given the world to neigh if she had dared, but she 
knew it would be very bad style, so, like an aristocrat as she- 
was, restrained herself; Bay Regent almost sawed Jimmy Del- 
mar’s arms off, looking like a Titan Bucephalus; while Forest 
King, with his nostrils dilated till the scarlet tinge on them 
glowed in the sun, his muscles quivering with excitement as 
intense as the little Irish mare’s, and all his Eastern and Eng- 
lish blood on fire for the fray, stood steady as a statue for all 
that, under the curb of a hand light as a woman’s, but firm 
as iron to control, and used to guide him by the slightest touch. 

All eyes were on that throng of the first mounts in the Serv- 
ice; brilliant glances by the hundred gleamed down behind hot- 
house bouquets of their chosen color, eager ones by the thou- 
sand stared thirstily from the crowded course, the roar of the 
Ring subsided for a second, a breathless attention and sus- 
pense succeeded it ; the Guardsmen sat on their drags, or 
lounged near the ladies with their race-glasses ready, and their 
habitual expression of gentle and resigned weariness in nowise 
altered because the Household, all in all, had from sixty to 
seventy thousand on the event; and the Seraph murmured 
mournfully to his cheroot, “ that chestnut’s no end fit,” strong 
as his faith was in the champion of the Brigades. 

A moment’s good start was caught — the flag dropped — off 
they went sweeping out for the first second like a line of Cav- 
alry about to charge. 

Another moment and they were scattered over the first field, 
Forest King, Wild Geranium, and Bay Regent leading for two 
lengths, when Montacute, with his habitual “ fast burst,” sent 
Pas de Charge past them like lightning. The Irish mare gave 
a rush and got alongside of him; the King would have done 
the same, but Cecil checked him and kept him in that cool, 
swinging canter which covered the grassland so lightly; Bay 
Regent’s vast thundering stride was Olympian, but Jimmy Del- 
mar saw his worst foe in the “ Guards’ Crack,” and waited on 
him warily, riding superbly himself. 

The first fence disposed of half the field; they crossed the 


36 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


second in the same order, Wild Geranium racing neck to neck 
with Pas de Charge; the King was all athirst to join the duello, 
but his owner kept him gently back, saving his pace and lifting 
him over the jumps as easily as a lapwing. The second fence 
proved a cropper to several, some awkward falls took place over 
it, and tailing commenced; after the third field, which was 
heavy plow, all knocked off but eight, and the real struggle began 
in sharp earnest : a good dozen, who had shown a splendid stride 
over the grass, being done up by the terrible work on the 
clods. 

The five favorites had it all to themselves; Day Star pound- 
ing onward at tremendous speed, Pas de Charge giving slight 
symptoms of distress owing to the madness of his first burst, 
the Irish mare literally flying ahead of him, Porest King and 
the chestnut waiting on one another. 

In the Grand Stand the Seraph’s eyes strained after the 
Scarlet and White, and he muttered in his mustaches, “Ye 
gods, what’s up! The world’s coming to an end! — Beauty’s 
turned cautious ! ” 

Cautious, indeed — with that giant of Pytchley fame running 
neck to neck by him; cautious — with two-thirds of the course 
unrun, and all the yawners yet to come; cautious — with the 
blood of Forest King lashing to boiling heat, and the wondrous 
greyhound stride stretching out faster and faster beneath him, 
ready at a touch to break away and take the lead ; but he would 
be reckless enough by and by ; reckless, as his nature was, under 
the indolent serenity of habit. 

Two more fences came, laced high and stiff with the Shire 
thorn, and with scarce twenty feet between them, the heavy 
plowed land leading to them, clotted, and black, and hard, with 
the fresh earthy scent steaming up as the hoofs struck the clods 
with a dull thunder — Pas de Charge rose to the first : distressed 
too early, his hind feet caught in the thorn, and he came down, 
rolling clear of his rider; Montacute picked him up with true 
science, but the day was lost to the Heavy Cavalry men. Forest 
King went in and out over both like a bird and led for the first 
time; the chestnut was not to be beat at fencing and ran even 
with him; Wild Geranium flew still as fleet as a deer — true to 
her sex, she would not bear rivalry; but little Grafton, though 
he rode like a professional, was but a young one, and went too 
wildly; her spirit wanted cooler curb. 

And now only Cecil loosened the King to his full will and 


THE SOLDIERS’ BLUE RIBBON. 37 

his full speed. Now only the beautiful Arab head was stretched 
like a racer’s in the run-in for the Derby, and the grand stride 
swept out till the hoofs seemed never to touch the dark earth 
they skimmed over; neither whip nor spur was needed, Bertie 
had only to leave the gallant temper and the generous fire that 
were roused in their might, to go their way and hold their 
own. His hands were low, his head a little back, his face very 
calm; the eyes only had a daring, eager, resolute will lighting 
them; Brixworth lay before him. He knew well what Forest 
King could do; but he did not know how great the chestnut 
Regent’s powers might be. 

The water gleamed before them, brown and swollen, and 
deepened with the meltings of winter snows a month before; 
the brook that has brought so many to grief over its famous 
banks, since cavaliers leaped it with their falcon on their wrist, 
or the mellow note of the horn rang over the woods in the hunt- 
ing days of Stuart reigns. They knew it well, that long line, 
shimmering there in the sunlight, the test that all must pass 
who go in for the Soldiers’ Blue Ribbon. Forest King scented 
water, and went on with his ears pointed, and his greyhound 
stride lengthening, quickening, gathering up all its force and 
its impetus for the leap that was before — then, like the rise and 
the swoop of a heron, he spanned the water, and, landing clear, 
launched forward with the lunge of a spear darted through air. 
Brixworth was passed — the Scarlet and White, a mere gleam 
of bright color, a mere speck in the landscape, to the breathless 
crowds in the stand, sped on over the brown and level grass- 
land ; two and a quarter miles done in four minutes and twenty 
seconds. Bay Regent was scarcely behind him; the chestnut 
abhorred the water, but a finer trained hunter was never sent 
over the Shires, and Jimmy Delmar rode like Grimshaw him- 
self. The giant took the leap in magnificent style, and thun- 
dered on neck and neck with the “ Guards’ Crack.” The Irish 
mare followed, and with miraculous gameness, landed safely; 
but her hind legs slipped on the bank, a moment was lost, and 
“ Baby ”, Grafton scarce knew enough to recover it, though he 
scoured on, nothing daunted. 

Pas de Charge, much behind, refused the yawner ; his strength 
was not more than his courage, but both had been strained too 
severely at first. Montacute struck the spurs into him with a 
savage blow over the head; the madness was its own punish- 
ment; the poor brute rose blindly to the jump, and missed the 


38 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


bank with a reel and a crash ; Sir Eyre was hurled out into the 
brook, and the hope of the Heavies lay there with his breast 
and forelegs resting on the ground, his hindquarters in the 
water, and his back broken. Pas de Charge would never again 
see the starting flag waved, or hear the music of the hounds, 
or feel the gallant life throb and glow through him at the 
rallying notes of the horn. His race was run. 

Not knowing, or looking, or heeding what happened behind, 
the trio tore on over the meadow and the plowed; the two fa- 
vorites neck by neck, the game little mare hopelessly behind 
through that one fatal moment over Brixworth. The turning- 
flags were passed; from the crowds on the course a great hoarse 
roar came louder and louder, and the shouts rang, changing 
every second: “Forest King wins!” “Bay Regent wins!” 
“Scarlet and White’s ahead!” “Violet’s up with him!” 
“ Violet’s past him! ” “ Scarlet recovers! ” “ Scarlet beats! ” 

“A cracker on the King!” “Ten to one on the Regent!” 
“ Guards are over the fence first ! ” “ Guards are winning ! ” 

“ Guards are losing ! ” “ Guards are beat ! ” 

Were they? 

As the shout rose, Cecil’s left stirrup-leather snapped and 
gave way; at the pace they were going most men, aye, and 
good riders too, would have been hurled out of their saddle by 
the shock; he scarcely swerved; a moment to ease the King 
and to recover his equilibrium, then he took the pace up again 
as though nothing had chanced. And his comrades of the 
Household, when they saw this through their race-glasses, broke 
through their serenity and burst into a cheer that echoed over 
the grasslands and the coppices like a clarion, the grand rich 
voice of the Seraph leading foremost and loudest — a cheer that 
rolled mellow and triumphant down the cold, bright air like the 
blast of trumpets, and thrilled on Bertie’s ear where he came 
down the course, a mile away. It made his heart beat quicker 
with a victorious, headlong delight, as his knees pressed closer 
into Forest King’s flanks, and, half stirrupless like the Arabs, 
he thundered forward to the greatest riding feat of his life. 
His face was very calm still, but his blood was in tumult, the 
delirium of pace had got on him, a minute of life like this was 
worth a year, and he knew that he would win or die for it, as the 
land seemed to fly like a black sheet under him, and, in that 
killing speed, fence and hedge and double and water all went 
by him like a dream; whirling underneath him as the gray 


THE SOLDIERS’ BLUE RIBBON. 39 

stretched, stomach to earth, over the level, and rose to leap after 
leap. 

For that instant’s pause, when the stirrup broke, threatened 
to lose him the race. 

He was more than a length behind the Regent, whose hoofs 
as they dashed the ground up sounded like thunder, and for 
whose herculean strength the plow had no terrors; it was more 
than the lead to keep now, there was ground to cover — and the 
King was losing like Wild Geranium. Cecil felt drunk with 
that strong, keen west wind that blew so strongly in his teeth, 
a passionate excitation was in him, every breath of winter air 
that rushed in its bracing currents round him seemed to lash 
him like a stripe — the Household to look on and see him beaten ! 

Certain wild blood, that lay latent in Cecil under the tranquil 
gentleness of temper and of custom, woke and had the mas- 
tery; he set his teeth hard, and his hands clinched like steel on 
the bridle. “ Oh, my beauty, my beauty ! ” he cried, all un- 
consciously half aloud, as they cleared the thirty-sixth fence. 
“ Kill me if you like, but don’t fail me ! ” 

As though Forest King heard the prayer and answered it 
with all his hero’s heart, the splendid form launched faster 
out, the stretching stride stretched farther yet with lightning 
spontaneity, every fiber strained, every nerve struggled; with 
a magnificent bound like an antelope the gray recovered the 
ground he had lost, and passed Bay Regent by a quarter-length. 
It was a neck-and-neck race once more, across the three meadows 
with the last and lower fences that were between them and the 
final leap of all : that ditch of artificial water with the towering 
double hedge of oak rails and of blackthorn, that was reared 
black and grim and well-nigh hopeless just in front of the 
Grand Stand. A roar like the roar of the sea broke up from the 
thronged course as the crowd hung breathless on the even race ; 
ten thousand shouts rang as thrice ten thousand eyes watched 
the closing contest, as superb a sight as the Shires ever saw; 
wdiile the two ran together — the gigantic chestnut, with every 
massive sinew swelled and strained to tension, side by side with 
the marvelous grace, the shining flanks, and the .Arabian-like 
head of the Guards’ horse. 

Louder and wilder the shrieked tumult rose : “ The chestnut 
beats ! ” “ The gray beats ! ” “ Scarlet’s ahead ! ” “ Bay Re- 

gent’s caught him!” “ Violet’s winning, Violet’s winning!” 
“ The King’s neck by neck ! ” “ The King’s beating ! ” “ The 


40 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


Guards will get it ! ” “ The Guards’ crack has it ! ” “ Not yet, 
net yet! ” “ Violet will thrash him at the jump! ” u Now for 
it ! ” “ The Guards, the Guards, the Guards ! ” “ Scarlet will 
win ! ” “ The King has the finish ! ” “ No, no, no, no ! ” 

Sent along at a pace that Epsom flat never eclipsed, sweep- 
ing by the Grand Stand like the flash of electric flame, they 
ran side to side one moment more; their foam flung on each 
other’s withers, their breath hot in each other’s nostrils, while 
the dark earth flew beneath their stride. The blackthorn was 
in front behind five bars of solid oak; the water yawning on 
its farther side, black and deep and fenced, twelve feet wide if 
it were an inch, with the same thorn wall beyond it; a leap no 
horse should have been given, no Steward should have set. 
Cecil pressed his knees closer and closer, and worked the gallant 
hero for the test; the surging roar of the throng, though so 
close, was dull on his ear; he heard nothing, knew nothing, saw 
nothing but that lean chestnut head beside him, the dull thud 
on the turf of the flying gallop, and the black wall that reared 
in his face. Forest King had done so much, could he have stay 
and strength for this? 

Cecil’s hands clinched unconsciously on the bridle, and his 
face was very pale — pale with excitation — as his foot, where 
the stirrup was broken, crushed closer and harder against the 
gray’s flanks. 

“ Oh, my darling, my beauty — now ! ” 

One touch of the spur — the first — and Forest King rose at 
the leap, all the life and power there were in him gathered for 
one superhuman and crowning effort: a flash of time, not half 
a second in duration, and he was lifted in the air higher, and 
higher, and higher in the cold, fresh, wild winter wind; stakes 
and rails, and thorn and water lay beneath him black and gaunt 
and shapeless, yawning like a grave; one bound, even in mid- 
air, one last convulsive impulse of the gathered limbs, and 
Forest .King was over! 

And as he galloped up the straight run-in, he was alone. 

Bay Regent had refused the leap. 

As the gray swept to the Judge’s chair, the air was rent with 
deafening cheers that seemed to reel like drunken shouts from 
the multitude. “ The Guards win, the Guards win ! ” and when 
his rider pulled up at the distance with the full sun shining on 
the scarlet and white, with the gold glisten of the embroidered 
“ Coeur Vaillant se fait Royaume,” Forest King stood in all his 


THE SOLDIERS’ BLUE RIBBON. 41 

glory, winner of the Soldiers’ Blue Ribbon, by a feat without 
its parallel in all the annals of the Gold Vase. 

But, as the crowd surged about him, and the mad cheering 
crowned his victory, and the Household in the splendor of their 
triumph and the fullness of their gratitude rushed from the 
drags and the stands to cluster to his saddle, Bertie looked as 
serenely and listlessly nonchalant as of old, while he nodded to 
the Seraph with a gentle smile. 

“ Rather a close finish, eh ? Have you any Moselle Cup going 
there? I’m a little thirsty.” 

Outsiders would much sooner have thought him defeated than 
triumphant ; no one, who had not known him, could possibly have 
imagined that he had been successful; an ordinary spectator 
would have concluded that, judging by the resigned weariness 
of his features, he had won the race greatly against his own 
will, and to his own infinite ennui. No one could have dreamt 
that he was thinking in his heart of hearts how passionately 
he loved the gallant beast that had been victor with him, and 
that, if he had followed out the momentary impulse in him, 
he could have put his arms round the noble bowed neck and 
kissed the horse like a woman! 

The Moselle Cup was brought to refresh the tired champion, 
and before he drank it Bertie glanced at a certain place in the 
Grand Stand and bent his head as the cup touched his lips: 
it was a dedication of his victory to the Queen of Beauty. 
Then he threw himself lightly out of saddle, and, as Forest 
King was led away for the after-ceremony of bottling, rubbing, 
and clothing, his rider, regardless of the roar and hubbub of 
the course, and of the tumultuous cheers that welcomed both 
him and his horse from the men who pressed round him, into 
whose pockets he had put thousands on thousands, and whose 
ringing hurrahs greeted the “ Guards’ Crack,” passed straight 
up toward Jimmy Delmar and held out his hand. 

“You gave me a close thing, Major Delmar. The Vase is 
as much yours as mine; if your chestnut had been as good 
a water jumper as he is a fencer, we should have been neck to 
neck at the finish.” 

The browned Indian-sunned face of the Lancer broke up into 
a cordial smile, and he shook the hand held out to him warmly ; 
defeat and disappointment had cut him to the core, for Jimmy 
was the first riding man of the Light Cavalry; but he would 


42 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


not have been the frank campaigner that he was if he had not 
responded to the graceful and generous overture of his rival 
and conqueror. 

“ Oh, I can take a beating ! ” he said good-humoredly ; “ at 
any rate, I am beat by the Guards ; and it is very little humilia- 
tion to lose against such riding as yours and such a magnificent 
brute as your King. I congratulate you most heartily, most 
sincerely.” 

And he meant it, too. Jimmy never canted, nor did he ever 
throw the blame, with paltry, savage vindictiveness, on the 
horse he had ridden. Some men there are — their name is legion 
— who never allow that it is their fault when they are “ no- 
where ” — oh, no ! it is the “ cursed screw ” always, according to 
them. But a very good rider will not tell you that. 

Cecil, while he talked, was glancing up at the Grand Stand, 
and when the others dispersed to look over the horses, and he 
had put himself out of his shell into his sealskin in the dressing- 
shed, he went up thither without a moment’s loss of time. 

He knew them all; those dainty beauties with their delicate 
cheeks just brightened by the western winterly wind, and their 
rich furs and laces glowing among the colors of their respective 
heroes ; he was the pet of them all ; “ Beauty ” had the suf- 
frages of the sex without exception ; he was received with bright 
smiles and graceful congratulations, even from those who had 
espoused Eyre Montacute’s cause, and still fluttered their losing 
azure, though the poor hunter lay dead, with his back broken, 
and a pistol-ball mercifully sent through his brains — the martyr 
to a man’s hot haste, as the dumb things have ever been since 
creation began. 

Cecil passed them as rapidly as he could for one so well re- 
ceived by them, and made his way to the center of the Stand, 
to the same spot at which he had glanced when he had drunk 
the Moselle. 

A lady turned to him; she looked like a rose camellia in 
her floating scarlet and white, just toned down and made perfect 
by a shower of Spanish lace; a beautiful brunette, dashing, yet 
delicate; a little fast, yet intensely thoroughbred; a coquette 
who would smoke a cigarette, yet a peeress who would never 
lose her dignity. 

“ Au cceur vaillant rien d’impossible ! ” she said, with an 
envoi of her lorgnon, and a smile that should have intoxicated 
him — a smile that might have rewarded a Kichepanse for a 


THE SOLDIERS 1 BLUE RIBBON. 

Hohenlinden. “ Superbly ridden ! I absolutely trembled for 
you as you lifted the King to that last leap. It was terrible ! ” 

It was terrible; and a woman, to say nothing of a woman 
who was in love with him, might well have felt a heart-sick 
fear at sight of that yawning water, and those towering walls 
of blackthorn, where one touch of the hoofs on the topmost 
bough, one spring too short of the gathered limbs, must havo 
been death to both horse and rider. But, as she said it, she 
was smiling, radiant, full of easy calm and racing interest, 
as became her ladyship who had had “ bets at even ” before 
now on Goodwood fillies, and could lead the first flight over 
the Belvoir and the Quorn countries. It was possible that her 
ladyship was too thoroughbred not to see a man killed over the 
oak-rails without deviating into unseemly emotion, or being 
capable of such bad style as to be agitated. 

Bertie, however, in answer, threw the tenderest eloquence into 
his eyes ; very learned in such eloquence. 

“ If I could not have been victorious while you looked on, 
I would at least not have lived to meet you here ! ” 

She laughed a little, so did he ; they were used to exchange 
these passages in an admirably artistic masquerade, but it was 
always a little droll to each of them to see the other wear the 
domino of sentiment, and neither had much credence in the 
other. 

“ What a preux chevalier ! ” cried his Queen of Beauty. 
“You would have died in a ditch out of homage to me. Who 
shall say that chivalry is past! Tell me, Bertie; is it very 
delightful, that desperate effort to break your neck? It looks 
pleasant, to judge by its effects. It is the only thing in the 
world that amuses you ! ” 

“ Well — there is a great deal to be said for it,” replied Bertie 
musingly. “ You see, until one has broken one’s neck, the ex- 
citement of the thing isn’t totally worn out ; can’t be, naturally, 
because the — what-do-you-call-it ? — consummation isn’t attained 
till then. The worst of it is, it’s getting commonplace, getting 
vulgar; such a number break their necks, doing Alps and that 
sort of thing, that we shall have nothing at all left to ourselves 
soon.” 

“Kot even the monopoly of sporting suicide! Very hard,” 
said her ladyship, with the lowest, most languid laugh in the 
world, very like “ Beauty’s ” own, save that it had a considerable 
inflection of studied affectation, of which he, however much of 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


1 a dandy he was, was wholly guiltless. “Well! you won mag- 
nificently ; that little black man, who is he ? Lancers, some- 
body said ? — ran you so fearfully close. I really thought at one 
time that the Guards had lost.” 

“ Do you suppose that a man happy enough to wear Lady 
Guenevere’s colors could lose? An embroidered scarf given by 
such hands has been a gage of victory ever since the days of 
tournaments ! ” murmured Cecil with the softest tenderness, but 
just enough laziness in the tone and laughter in the eye to 
make it highly doubtful whether he was not laughing both at 
her and at himself, and was wondering why the deuce a fellow 
had to talk such nonsense. Yet she was Lady Guenevere, with 
whom he had been in love ever since they stayed together at 
Belvoir for the Croxton Park week the autumn previous; and 
who was beautiful enough to make their “ friendship ” as en- 
chanting as a page out of the “ Decamerone.” And while he 
bent over her, flirting in the fashion that made him the darling 
of the drawing-rooms, and looking down into her superb Ve- 
lasquez eyes, he did not know, and if he had known would have 
been careless of it, that afar off, white with rage, and with his 
•gaze straining on to the course through his race-glass, Ben 
Davis, “ the welsher,” who had watched the finish — watched the 
“ Guards’ Crack ” landed at the distance — muttered, with a 
mastiff’s savage growl: 

“He wins, does he? Curse him! The d d swell — he 

shan’t win long.” 


CHAPTER IV. 


LOVE A LA MODE. 

Life was very pleasant at Royallieu. 

It lay in the Melton country, and was equally well placed 
for Pytchley, Quorn, and Belvoir, besides possessing its own 
small but very perfect pack of “ little ladies,” or the “ dem- 
oiselles,” as they were severally nicknamed; the game was 
closely preserved, pheasants were fed on Indian corn till they 
were the finest birds in the country, and in the little winding 
paths of the elder and bilberry coverts thirty first-rate shots, 
with two loading-men to each, could find flock and feather to 
amuse them till dinner, with rocketers and warm corners enough 
to content the most insatiate of knickerbockered gunners. The 
stud was superb; the cook, a French artist of consummate 
genius, who had a brougham to his own use and wore diamonds 
of the first water; in the broad beech-studded grassy lands no 
lesser thing than doe and deer ever swept through the thick ferns 
in the sunlight and the shadow; a retinue of powdered servants 
filled the old halls, and guests of highest degree dined in its 
stately banqueting room, with its scarlet and gold, its Van- 
dykes and its Vernets, and yet — there was terribly little money 
at Royallieu with it all. Its present luxury was purchased at 
the cost of the future, and the parasite of extravagance was 
constantly sapping, unseen, the gallant old Norman-planted oak 
of the family-tree. But then, who thought of that? Nobody. 
It was the way of the House never to take count of the morrow. 
True, any one of them would have died a hundred deaths 
rather than have had one acre of the beautiful green diadem 
of woods felled by the ax of the timber contractor, or passed 
to the hands of a stranger ; but no one among them ever thought 
that this was the inevitable end to which they surely drifted 
with blind and unthinking improvidence. The old Viscount, 
haughtiest of haughty nobles, would never abate one jot of his 
accustomed magnificence; and his sons had but imbibed the 
teaching of all that surrounded them; they did but do in man- 
hood what they had been unconsciously molded to do in boy- 

45 


46 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


hood, when they were sent to Eton at ten with gold dressing- 
boxes to grace their Dame’s tables, embryo Dukes for their co- 
fags, and tastes that already knew to a nicety the worth of 
the champagnes at the Christopher. The old, old story — how 
it repeats itself! Boys grow up amid profuse prodigality, and 
are launched into a world where they can no more arrest them- 
selves than the feather-weight can pull in the lightning stride 
of the two-year-old, who defies all check and takes the flat as 
he chooses. They are brought up like young Dauphins, and 
tossed into the costly whirl to float as best they can — on nothing. 
Then, on the lives and deaths that follow; on the graves where 
a dishonored alien lies forgotten by the dark Austrian lake- 
side, or under the monastic shadow of some crumbling Spanish 
crypt; where a red cross chills the lonely traveler in the virgin 
solitudes of Amazonian forest aisles, or the wild scarlet creepers 
of Australia trail over a nameless mound above the trackless 
stretch of sun-warmed waters — then at them the world “ shoots 
out its lips with scorn.” Not on them lies the blame. 

A wintry, watery sun was shining on the terraces as Lord 
Royallieu paced up and down the morning after the Grand 
Military; his step and limbs excessively enfeebled, but the car- 
riage of his head and the flash of his dark hawk’s eyes as proud 
and untamable as in his earliest years. He never left his own 
apartments ; and no one, save his favorite “ little Berk,” ever 
went to him without his desire. He was too sensitive a man 
to thrust his age and ailing health in among the young leaders 
of fashion, the wild men of pleasure, the good wits and the 
good shots of his son’s set; he knew very well that his own 
day was past; that they would have listened to him out of the 
patience of courtesy, but that they would have wished him away 
as “ no end of a bore.” He was too shrewd not to know this ; 
but he was too quickly galled ever to bear to have it recalled 
to him. 

He looked up suddenly and sharply: coming toward him 
he saw the figure of the Guardsman. For “Beauty” the Vis- 
count had no love; indeed, well-nigh a hatred, for a reason 
never guessed by others, and never betrayed by him. 

Bertie was not like the Royallieu race; he resembled his 
mother’s family. She, a beautiful and fragile creature whom 
her second son had loved, for the first years of his life, as he 
would have thought it now impossible that he could love any- 
one, had married the Viscount with no affection toward him, 


LOVE A LA MODE. 


47 


while he had adored her with a fierce and jealous passion that 
her indifference only inflamed. Throughout her married life, 
however, she had striven to render loyalty and tenderness to- 
ward a lord into whose arms she had been thrown, trembling 
and reluctant; of his wife’s fidelity he could not entertain a 
doubt; though, that he had never won her heart, he could not 
choose but know. He knew more, too; for she had told it him 
with a noble candor before he wedded her; knew that the man 
she did love was a penniless cousin, a cavalry officer, who had 
made a famous name among the wild mountain tribes of 
Northern India. This cousin, Alan Bertie — a fearless and 
chivalrous soldier, fitter for the days of knighthood than for 
these — had seen Lady Royallieu at Nice, some three years after 
her marriage; accident had thrown them across each other’s 
path ; the old love, stronger, perhaps, now than it had ever been, 
had made him linger in her presence — had made her shrink 
from sending him to exile. Evil tongues at last had united 
their names together; Alan Bertie had left the woman he idol- 
ized lest slander should touch her through him, and fallen two 
years later under the dark dank forests on the desolate moor- 
side of the hills of Ilindostan, where long before he had ren- 
dered “ Bertie’s Horse ” the most famous of all the wild Irregu- 
lars of the East. 

After her death. Lord Royallieu found Alan’s miniature 
among her papers, and recalled those winter months by the 
Mediterranean till he cherished, with the fierce, eager, self- 
torture of a jealous nature, doubts and suspicions that, during 
her life, one glance from her eyes would have disarmed and 
abashed. Her second and favorite child bore her family name 
— her late lover’s name; and, in resembling her race, resembled 
the dead soldier. It was sufficient to make him hate Bertie 
with a cruel and savage detestation, which he strove indeed to 
temper, for he was by nature a just man, and, in his better 
moments, knew that his doubts wronged both the living and 
the dead; but which colored, too strongly to be dissembled, all 
his feelings and his actions toward his son, and might both 
have soured and wounded any temperament less nonchalantly 
gentle and supremely careless than Cecil’s. 

As it was, Bertie was sometimes surprised at his father’s 
dislike to him, but never thought much about it, and attributed 
it, when he did think of it, to the caprices of a tyrannous old 
man. To be jealous of the favor shown to his boyish brother 


* 


48 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


could never for a moment have come into his imagination. 
Lady Royallieu with her last words had left the little fellow, 
a child of three years old, to the affection and the care of 
Bertie — himself then a boy of twelve or fourteen — and little 
as he thought of such things now, the trust of his dying mother 
had never been wholly forgotten. 

A heavy gloom came now over the Viscount’s still handsome 
aquiline, saturnine face, as his second son approached up the 
terrace; Bertie was too like the cavalry soldier whose form he 
had last seen standing against the rose light of a Mediterranean 
sunset. The soldier had been dead eight-and-twenty years; but 
the jealous hate was not dead yet. 

Cecil took off his hunting-cap with a courtesy that sat very 
well on his habitual languid nonchalance; he never called his 
father anything but “ Royal ” ; rarely saw, still less rarely con- 
sulted him, and cared not a straw for his censure or opinion; 
but he was too thoroughbred by nature to be able to follow 
the underbred indecorum of the day which makes disrespect to 
old age the fashion. “ You sent for me? ” he asked, taking the 
cigarette out of his mouth. 

“No, sir,” answered the old lord curtly; “I sent for your 
brother. The fools can’t take even a message right now, it 
seems.” 

“ Shouldn’t have named us so near alike ; it’s often a bore ! ” 
said Bertie. 

“ I didn’t name you, sir ; your mother named you,” answered 
his father sharply; the subject irritated him. 

“ It’s of no consequence which ! ” murmured Cecil, with an 
expostulatory wave of his cigar. “ We’re not even asked whether 
we like to come into the world ; we can’t expect to be asked what 
we like to be called in it. Good-day to you, sir.” 

He turned to move away to the house, but his father stopped 
him ; he knew that he had been discourteous — a far worse crime 
in Lord Royallieu’s eyes than to be heartless. 

“ So you won the Vase yesterday? ” he asked, pausing in his 
walk with his back bowed, but his stern, silver-haired head 
erect. 

“ I didn’t— the King did.” 

“ That’s absurd, sir,” said the Viscount, in his resonant and 
yet melodious voice. “ The finest horse in the world may have 
his back broke by bad riding, and a screw has won before now 
when it’s been finely handled. The finish was tight, wasn’t it ? ” 


LOVE A LA MODE. 49 

“Well — rather. I have ridden closer spins, though. The 
fallows were light.” 

Lord Royallieu smiled grimly. 

“ I know what the Shire ‘ plow 9 is like,” he said, with a flash 
of his falcon eyes over the landscape, where, in the days of his 
youth, he had led the first flight so often; George Rex, and 
Waterford, and the Berkeleys, and the rest following the rally 
of his hunting-horn. “ You won much in bets? ” 

“ Very fair, thanks.” 

“ And won’t be a shilling richer for it this day next week ! ” 
retorted the Viscount, with a rasping, grating irony; he could 
not help darting savage thrusts at this man who looked at him 
with eyes so cruelly like Alan Bertie’s. “You play £5 points, 
and lay £500 on the odd trick, I’ve heard, at your whist in the 
Clubs — pretty prices for a younger son ! ” 

“Never bet on the odd trick; spoils the game; makes you 
sacrifice play to the trick. We always bet on the game,” said 
Cecil, with gentle weariness; the sweetness of his temper was 
proof against his father’s attacks upon his patience. 

“No matter what you bet, sir; you live as if you were a 
Rothschild while you are a beggar ! ” 

“ Wish I were a beggar : fellows always have no end in stock, 
they say; and your tailor can’t worry you very much when all 
you have to think about is an artistic arrangement of tatters! ” 
murmured Bertie, whose impenetrable serenity was never to 
be ruffled by his father’s bitterness. 

“ You will soon have your wish, then,” retorted the Viscount, 
with the unprovoked and reasonless passion which he vented 
on everyone, but on none so much as the son he hated. “ You 
are on a royal road to it. I live out of the world, but I hear 
from it, sir. I hear that there is not a man in the Guards — not 
even Lord Rockingham — who lives at the rate of imprudence 
you do; that there is not a man who drives such costly horses, 
keeps such costly mistresses, games to such desperation, fools 
gold away with such idiocy as you do. You conduct yourself as 
if you were a millionaire, sir; and what are you? A pauper 
on my bounty, and on your brother Montagu’s after me — a 
pauper with a tinsel fashion, a gilded beggary, a Queen’s com- 
mission to cover a sold-out poverty, a dandy’s reputation to 
stave off a defaulter’s future! A pauper, sir — and a Guards- 
man ! ” • 

The coarse and cruel irony flashed out with wicked, scorch- 


50 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


ing malignity; lashing and upbraiding the man who was the 
victim of his own unwisdom and extravagance. 

A slight tinge of color came on his son’s face as he heard; 
but he gave no sign that he was moved, no sign of impatience 
or anger. He lifted his cap again, not in irony, but with a 
grave respect in his action that was totally contrary to his whole 
temperament. 

“ This sort of talk is very exhausting, very bad style,” he said, 
with his accustomed gentle murmur. “ I will bid you good- 
morning, my lord.” 

And he went without another word. Crossing the length 
of the old-fashioned Elizabethan terrace, little Berk passed him ; 
he motioned the lad toward the Viscount. “ Royal wants to 
see you, young one.” 

The boy nodded and went onward; and, as Bertie turned to 
enter the low door that led out to the stables, he saw his father 
meet the lad — meet him with a smile that changed the whole 
character of his face, and pleasant, kindly words of affectionate 
welcome ; drawing his arm about Berkeley’s shoulder, and look- 
ing with pride upon his bright and gracious youth. 

More than an old man’s preference would be thus won by 
the young one ; a considerable portion of their mother’s fortune, 
so left that it could not be dissipated, yet could be willed to 
which son the Viscount chose, would go to his brother by this 
passionate partiality; but there was not a tinge of jealousy in 
Cecil; whatever else his faults he had no mean ones, and the 
boy was dear to him, by a quite unconscious, yet unvarying, 
obedience to his dead mother’s wish. 

“ Royal hates me as game-birds hate a red dog. Why the 
deuce, I wonder ? ” he thought, with a certain slight touch of 
pain, despite his idle philosophies and devil-may-care indiffer- 
ence. “ Well — I am good for nothing, I suppose. Certainly 
I am not good for much, unless it’s riding and making 
love.” 

With which summary of his merits, “ Beauty,” who felt him- 
self to be a master in those two arts, but thought himself a bad 
fellow out of them, sauntered away to join the Seraph and 
the rest of his guests; his father’s words pursuing him a little, 
despite his carelessness, for they had borne an unwelcome meas- 
ure of truth. 

“ Royal can hit hard,” his thoughts continued. “ ‘ A pauper 
and a Guardsman!’ By Jove! it’s true enough; but he made 


LOVE A LA MODE. 


51 


me so. They brought me up as if I had a million coming to 
me, and turned me out among the cracks to take my running 
with the best of them — and they give me just about what pays 
my groom’s book! Then they wonder that a fellow goes to the 
Jews. Where the deuce else can he go? ” 

And Bertie, whom his gains the day before had not much 
benefited, since his play-debts, his young brother’s needs, and 
the Zu-Zu’s insatiate little hands were all stretched ready to 
devour them without leaving a, sovereign for more serious lia- 
bilities, went, for it was quite early morning, to act the M. F. H. 
in his father’s stead at the meet on the great lawns before the 
house, for the Royallieu “ lady-pack ” were very famous in the 
Shires, and hunted over the same country alternate days with 
the Quorn. They moved off ere long to draw the Holt Wood, 
in as open a morning .and as strong a scenting wind as ever 
favored Melton Pink. 

A whimper and “gone away!” soon echoed from Beebyside, 
and the pack, not letting the fox hang a second, dashed after 
him, making straight for Scraptoft. One of the fastest things 
up-wind that hounds ever ran took them straight through the 
Spinnies, past Hamilton Farm, away beyond Burkby village, 
and down into the valley of the Wreake without a check, where 
he broke away, was headed, tried earths, and was pulled down 
scarce forty minutes from the find. The pack then drew 
Hungerton foxhole blank, drew Carver’s spinnies without a 
whimper; and lastly, drawing the old familiar Billesden Cop- 
low, had a short, quick burst with a brace of cubs, and return- 
ing, settled themselves to a fine dog fox that was raced an hour- 
and-half, hunted slowly for fifty minutes, raced again another 
hour-and-quarter, sending all the field to their “ second horses ” ; 
and after a clipping chase through the cream of the grass coun- 
try, nearly saved his brush in the twilight when scent was lost 
in a rushing hailstorm, but had the “ little ladies ” laid on 
again like wildfire, and was killed with the “ who- whoop ! ” ring- 
ing far and away over Glenn Gorse, after a glorious run — thirty 
miles in and out — with pace that tried the best of them. 

A better day’s sport even the Quorn had never had in all 
its brilliant annals, and faster things the Melton men them- 
selves had never wanted : both those who love the “ quickest 
thing you ever knew — thirty minutes without a check — such a 
pace ! ” and care little whether the finale be “ killed ” or “ broke 
away,” and those of older fashion, who prefer “ long day, you 


52 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


know, steady as old time; the beauties stuck like wax through 
fourteen parishes, as I live ; six hours, if it were a minute ; horses 
dead-beat ; positively walked, you know ; no end of a day ! ” but 
must have the fatal “ who-whoop ” as conclusion — both of 
these, the “ new style and the old,” could not but be content 
with the doings of the “ demoiselles ” from start to finish. 

Was it likely that Cecil remembered the caustic lash of his 
father’s ironies while he was lifting Mother of Pearl over the 
posts and rails, and sweeping . ou, with the halloo ringing down 
the wintry wind as the grasslands flew beneath him? Was it 
likely that he recollected the difficulties that hung above him 
while he was dashing down the Gorse happy as a king, with 
the wild hail driving in his face, and a break of stormy sun- 
shine just welcoming the gallant few who were 'landed at the 
death, as twilight fell? Was it likely that he could unlearn all 
the lessons of his life, and realize in how near a neighborhood 
he stood to ruin when he was drinking Regency sherry out of 
his gold flask as he crossed the saddle of his second horse, or, 
smoking, rode slowly homeward; chatting with the Seraph 
through the leafless, muddy lanes in the gloaming? 

Scarcely; it is very easy to remember our difficulties when 
we are eating and drinking them, so to speak, in bad soups, 
and worse wines in continental impecuniosity ; sleeping on them 
as rough Australian shake-downs, or wearing them perpetually 
in Californian rags and tatters — it were impossible very well to 
escape from them then; but it is very hard to remember them 
when every touch and shape of life is pleasant to us — when 
everything about us is symbolical and redolent of wealth and 
ease — when the art of enjoyment is the only one we are called 
on to study, and the science of pleasure all we are asked to 
explore. 

It is well-nigh impossible to believe yourself a beggar while 
you never want sovereigns for whist ; and it would be beyond the 
powers of human nature to conceive your ruin irrevocable 
while you still eat turbot and terrapin, with a powdered giant 
behind your chair daily. Up in his garret a poor wretch knows 
very well what he is, and realizes in stern fact the extremities 
of the last sou, the last shirt, and the last hope ; but in these 
devil-may-care pleasures — in this pleasant, reckless, velvet-soft 
rush down-hill — in this club-palace, with every luxury that the 
heart of man can devise and desire, yours to command at your 
will — it is hard work, then, to grasp the truth that the crossing 


LOVE A LA MODE. 53 

sweeper yonder, in the dust of Pall Mall, is really not more 
utterly in the toils of poverty than you are! 

“ Beauty ” was never, in the whole course of his days, virtu- 
ally or physically, or even metaphorically, reminded that he was 
not a millionaire ; much less still was he ever reminded so pain- 
fully. 

Life petted him, pampered him, caressed him, gifted him, 
though of half his gifts he never made use; lodged him like a 
prince, dined him like a king, and never recalled to him by 
a single privation or a single sensation that he was not as rich 
a man as his brother-in-arms, the Seraph, future Duke of 
Lyonnesse. How could he then bring himself to understand, as 
nothing less than truth, the grim and cruel insult his father 
had flung at him in that brutally bitter phrase — “ A Pauper 
and a Guardsman ” ? If he had ever been near a comprehension 
of it, w r hich he never was, he must have ceased to realize it 
when — pressed to dine with Lord Guenevere, near whose house 
the last fox had been killed, while a groom dashed over to 
Boyallieu for his change of clothes — he caught a glimpse, as 
they passed through the hall, of the ladies taking their pre- 
prandial cups of tea in the library, an enchanting group of lace 
and silks, of delicate hue and scented hair, of blonde cheeks and 
brunette tresses, of dark velvets and gossamer tissue; and when 
he had changed the scarlet for dinner-dress, went down among 
them to be the darling of that charmed circle, to be smiled 
on and coquetted with by those soft, languid aristocrats, to be 
challenged by the lustrous eyes of his chatelaine and chere 
amie, to be spoiled as women will spoil the privileged pet of 
their drawing rooms whom they have made “ free of the guild,” 
and endowed with a flirting commission, and acquitted of any- 
thing “ serious.” 

He was the recognized darling and permitted property of 
the young married beauties; the unwedded knew he was hope- 
less for them, and tacitly left him to the more attractive con- 
querors, who hardly prized the Seraph so much as they did 
Bertie, to sit in their barouches and opera boxes, ride and drive 
and yacht with them, conduct a Boccaccio intrigue through 
the height of the season, and make them really believe them- 
selves actually in love while they were at the moors or down 
the Hile, and would have given their diamonds to get a new 
distraction. 

Lady Guenevere was the last of these, his titled and wedded 


54 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


captors ; and perhaps the most resistless of all of them. Neither 
of them believed very much in their attachment, but both of 
them wore the masquerade dress to perfection. He had fallen 
in love with her as much as he ever fell in love, which was just 
sufficient to amuse him, and never enough to disturb him. tie 
let himself be fascinated, not exerting himself either to resist 
or advance the affair till he was, perhaps, a little more entan- 
gled with her than it was, according to his canons, expedient to 
be ; and they had the most enchanting — friendship. 

Nobody was ever so indiscreet as to call it anything else; and 
my Lord was too deeply absorbed in the Alderney beauties that 
stood knee-deep in the yellow straw of his farmyard, and the 
triumphant conquests that he gained over his brother peers’ 
Shorthorns and Suffolks, to trouble his head about Cecil’s at- 
tendance on his beautiful Countess. 

They corresponded in Spanish; they had a thousand charm- 
ing ciphers ; they made the columns of the “ Times ” and the 
“ Post ” play the unconscious role of medium to appointments ; 
they eclipsed all the pages of Calderon’s or Congreve’s comedies 
in the ingenuities with which they met, wrote, got invitations 
together to the same houses, and arranged signals for mute com- 
munication: but there was not the slightest occasion for it all. 
It passed the time, however, and went far to persuade them 
that they really were in love, and had a mountain of difficulties 
and dangers to contend with ; it added the “ spice to the sauce,” 
and gave them the “ relish of being forbidden.” Besides, an 
open scandal would have been very shocking to her brilliant 
ladyship, and there was nothing on earth, perhaps, of which he 
would have had a more lively dread than a “ scene ” ; but his 
present “ friendship ” was delightful, and presented no such 
dangers, while his fair “ friend ” was one of the greatest beau- 
ties and the greatest coquettes of her time. Her smile was 
honor; her fan was a scepter; her face was perfect; and her 
heart never troubled herself or her lovers; if she had a fault, 
she was a trifle exacting, but that was not to be wondered at 
in one so omnipotent, and her chains, after all, were made of 
roses. 

As she sat in the deep ruddy glow of the library fire, with 
the light flickering on her white brow and her violet velvets; 
as she floated to the head of her table, with opals shining among 
her priceless point laces, and some tropical flower with leaves 
of glistening gold crowning her bronze hair ; as she glided down 


LOVE A LA MODE. 


55 


in a waltz along the polished floor, or bent her proud head over 
ecarte in a musing grace that made her opponent utterly forget 
to mark the king or even play his cards at all; as she talked 
in the low music of her voice of European imbrogli, and con- 
sols and coupons, for she was a politician and a speculator, or 
lapsed into a beautifully tinted study of la femme incomprise, 
when time and scene suited, when the stars were very clear 
above the terraces without, and the conservatory very solitary, 
and a touch of Musset or Owen Meredith chimed in well 
with the light and shade of the oleanders and the brown 
luster of her own eloquent glance — in all these how superb 
she was ! 

And if in truth her bosom only fell with the falling of Shares, 
and rose with the rising of Bonds; if her soft shadows were 
only taken up, like the purple tinting under her lashes, to em- 
bellish her beauty ; if in her heart of hearts she thought Musset 
a fool, and wondered why “ Lucille ” was not written in prose, 
in her soul far preferring “ Le Eollet ” ; why — it did not matter, 
that I can see. All great ladies gamble in stocks nowadays under 
the rose, and women are for the most part as cold, clear, hard, 
and practical as their adorers believe them the contrary; and 
a femme incomprise is so charming, when she avows herself 
comprehended by you, that you would never risk spoiling the 
confidence by hinting a doubt of its truth. If she and Bertie 
only played at love; if neither believed much in the other; if 
each trifled with a pretty gossamer soufflet of passion much as 
they trifled with their soufflets at dinner ; if both tried it to trifle 
away ennui much as they tried staking a Friedrich d’Or at 
Baden, this light, surface, fashionable, philosophic form of a 
passion they both laughed at, in its hot and serious follies, 
suited them admirably. Had it ever mingled a grain of bitter- 
ness in her ladyship’s Souchong before dinner, or given an 
aroma of bitterness to her lover’s Naples punch in the smoking 
room, it would have been out of all keeping with themselves and 
their world. 

Nothing on earth is so pleasant as being a little in love; noth- 
ing on earth so destructive as being too much so; and as Cecil, 
in the idle enjoyment of the former gentle luxury, flirted with 
his liege lady that night; lying back in the softest of lounging- 
chairs, with his dark, dreamy, handsome eyes looking all the 
eloquence in the world, and his head drooped till his mustaches 
were almost touching her laces, his Queen of Beauty listened 


56 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


with charmed interest, and to look at him he might have been 
praying after the poet: 

How is it under our control 

To love or not to love ? 

In real truth he was gently murmuring : 

“ Such a pity that you missed to-day ! Hounds found di- 
rectly; three of the fastest things I ever knew, one after an- 
other; you should have seen the ‘little ladies’ head him just 
above the Gorse ! Three hares crossed us and a fresh fox ; some 
of the pack broke away after the new scent, but old Bluebell, 
your pet, held on like death, and most of them kept after her — 
you had your doubts about Silver Trumpet’s shoulders; they’re 
not the thing, perhaps, but she ran beautifully all day, and 
didn’t show a symptom of rioting.” 

Cecil could, when needed, do the Musset and Meredith style 
of thing to perfection, but on the whole he preferred love a la 
mode; it is so much easier and less exhausting to tell your 
mistress of a ringing run, or a close finish, than to turn per- 
petual periods on the luster of her eyes, and the eternity of your 
devotion. 

Hor did it at all interfere with the sincerity of his worship 
that the Zu-Zu was at the prettiest littlfe box in the world, in 
the neighborhood of Market Harborough, which he had taken 
for her, and had been at the meet that day in her little toy trap, 
with its pair of snowy ponies and its bright blue liveries that 
drove so desperately through his finances, and had ridden his 
hunter Maraschino with immense dash and spirit for a young 
lady who had never done anything but pirouette till the last 
six months, and a total and headlong disregard of “purlers” 
very reckless in a white-skinned, bright-eyed, illiterate, ava- 
ricious little beauty, whose face was her fortune ; and who most 
assuredly would have been adored no single moment longer, had 
she scarred her fair, tinted cheek with the blackthorn, or started 
as a heroine with a broken nose like Fielding’s cherished 
Amelia. The Zu-Zu might rage, might sulk, might pout, might 
even swear all sorts of naughty Mabille oaths, most villainously 
pronounced, at the ascendency of her haughty, unapproachable 
patrician rival — she did do all these things — but Bertie would 
not have been the consummate tactician, the perfect flirt, the 
skilled and steeled campaigner in the boudoirs that he was, if 
he had not been equal to the delicate task of managing both 


LOVE A LA MODE. 


57 


the peeress and the ballet-dancer with inimitable ability; even 
when they placed him in the seemingly difficult dilemma of 
meeting them both, with twenty yards between them, on the 
neutral ground of the gathering to see the Pytchley or the 
Tailby throw off — a task he had achieved with victorious 
brilliance more than once already this season. 

“ You drive a team. Beauty — never drive a team,” the Seraph 
had said on occasion, over a confidential “sherry-peg” in the 
mornings, meaning by the metaphor of a team Lady Guenevere, 
the Zu-Zu, and various other contemporaries in Bertie’s affec- 
tions. “Nothing on earth so dangerous; your leader will bolt, 
or your off-wheeler will turn sulky, or your young one will 
passage and make the very deuce of a row; they’ll never go 
quiet till the end, however clever your hand is on the ribbons. 
Now, I’ll drive six-in-hand as soon as any man — drove a ten- 
hander last year in the Bois — when the team comes out of the 
stables; but I’m hanged if I’d risk my neck with managing 
even a pair of women. Have one clean out of the shafts before 
you trot out another ! ” 

To which salutary advice Cecil only gave a laugh, going on 
his own ways with the “ team ” as before, to the despair of his 
fidus Achates; the Seraph being a quarry so incessantly pur- 
sued by dowager-beaters, chaperone-keepers, and the whole hunt 
of the Matrimonial Pack, with those clever hounds Belle and 
Fashion ever leading in full cry after him, that he dreaded 
the sight of a ballroom meet; and, shunning the rich preserves 
of the Salons, ran to earth persistently in the shady Wood of 
St. John’s, and got — at some little cost and some risk of trap- 
ping, it is true, but still efficiently — preserved from all other 
hunters or poachers by the lawless Kobin Hoods aux yeux noirs 
of those welcome and familiar coverts. 


CHAPTER V. 


UNDER THE KEEPER’S TREE. 

“ You’re a lad o’ wax, my beauty! ” cried Mr. Rake enthusi- 
astically, surveying the hero of the Grand Military with ador- 
ing eyes as that celebrity, without a hair turned or a muscle 
swollen from his exploit, was having a dressing down after a 
gentle exercise. “You’ve pulled it off, haven’t you? You’ve 
cut the work out for ’em! You’ve shown ’em what a luster is! 
Strike me a loser, but what a deal there is in blood. The littlest 
pippin that ever threw a leg across the pigskin knows that in 
the stables ; then why the dickens do the world run against such 
a plain fact out of it?” 

And Rake gazed with worship at the symmetrical limbs of 
the champion of the “ First Life,” and plunged into specula- 
tion on the democratic tendencies of the age, as clearly contra- 
dicted by all the evidences of the flat and furrow, while Forest 
King drank a dozen go-downs of water, and was rewarded for 
the patience with which he had subdued his inclination to kick, 
fret, spring, and break away throughout the dressing by a full 
feed thrown into his crib, which Rake watched him, with ador- 
ing gaze, eat to the very last grain. 

“ You precious one! ” soliloquized that philosopher, who loved 
the horse with a sort of passion since his victory over the Shires. 
“ What a lot o’ enemies you’ve been and gone and made ! — 
that’s where it is, my boy; nobody can’t never forgive Success. 
All them fielders have lost such a sight of money by you; them 
bookmakers have had such a lot of pots upset by you ; bless you ! 
if you were on the flat, you’d be doctored or roped in no time. 
You’ve won for the gentlemen, my lovely — for your own cracks, 
my boy — and that’s just what they’ll never pardon you.” - 

And Rake, rendered almost melancholy by his thoughts (he 
liked the “ gentlemen ” himself), went out of the box to get into 
saddle and ride off on an errand of his master’s to the Zu-Zu 
at her tiny hunting-lodge, where the snow-white ponies made 
her stud, and where she gave enchanting little hunting-dinners 
at which she sang equally enchanting little hunting-songs, and 


UNDER THE KEEPER’S TREE. 59 

arrayed herself in the Fontainebleau hunting costume, gold- 
hilted knife and all, and spent Cecil’s winnings for him with 
a rapidity that threatened to leave very few of them for the 
London season. She was very pretty, sweetly pretty; with hair 
that wanted no gold powder, the clearest, sauciest eyes, and the 
handsomest mouth in the world; but of grammar she had not 
a notion, of her aspirates she had never a recollection, of con- 
versation she had not an idea; of slang she had, to be sure, a 
repertoire, but to this was her command of language limited. 
She dressed perfectly, but she was a vulgar little soul; drank 
everything, from Bass’ ale to rum-punch, and from cherry- 
brandy to absinthe; thought it the height of wit to stifle you 
with cayenne slid into your vanilla ice, and the climax of 
repartee to cram your hat full of peach stones and lobster shells ; 
was thoroughly avaricious, thoroughly insatiate, thoroughly 
heartless, pillaged with both hands, and then never had enough ; 
had a coarse good nature when it cost her nothing, and was 
“ as jolly as a grig,” according to her phraseology, so long as 
she could stew her pigeons in champagne, drink wines and 
liqueurs that were beyond price, take the most dashing trap in 
the Park up to Flirtation Corner, and laugh and sing and eat 
Richmond dinners, and show herself at the Opera with Bertie 
or some other “ swell ” attached to her, in the very box next to 
a Duchess. 

The Zu-Zu was perfectly happy; and as for the pathetic 
pictures that novelists and moralists draw, of vice sighing amid 
turtle and truffles for childish innocence in the cottage at home 
where honeysuckles blossomed and brown brooks made melody, 
and passionately grieving on the purple cushions of a barouche 
for the time of straw pallets and untroubled sleep, why — the 
Zu-Zu would have vaulted herself on the box-seat of a drag, 
and told you “ to stow all that trash ” ; her childish recollec- 
tions were of a stifling lean-to with the odor of pigsty and 
straw-yard, pork for a feast once a week, starvation all the other 
six days, kicks, slaps, wrangling, and a general atmosphere of 
beer and wash-tubs; she hated her past, and loved her cigar 
on the drag. The Zu-Zu is fact; the moralists’ pictures are 
moonshine. 

The Zu-Zu is an openly acknowledged fact, moreover, daily 
becoming more prominent in the world, more brilliant, more 
frankly recognized, and more omnipotent. Whether this will 
ultimately prove for the better or the worse, it would be a 


60 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


bold man who should dare say; there is at least one thing left 
to desire in it — i. e., that the synonym of “ Aspasia,” which 
serves so often to designate in journalistic literature these Free 
Lances of life, were more suitable in artistic and intellectual 
similarity, and that, when the Zu-Zu and her sisterhood plunge 
their white arms elbow-deep into so many fortunes, and rule the 
world right and left as they do, they could also sound their 
IFs properly, and know a little orthography, if they could not 
be changed into such queens of grace, of intellect, of sovereign 
mind and splendid wit as were their prototypes when she whose 
name they debase held her rule in the City of the Violet Crown, 
and gathered about her Phidias the divine, haughty and elo- 
quent Antipho, the gay Crates, the subtle Protagorus, Cratinus 
so acrid and yet so jovial, Damon of the silver lyre, and the 
great poets who are poets for all time. Author and artist, noble 
and soldier, court the Zu-Zu order now as the Athenians courted 
their brilliant itaipai $ but it must be confessed that the Hel- 
lenic idols were of a more exalted type than are the Hyde Park 
goddesses ! 

However, the Zu-Zu was the rage, and spent Bertie’s money, 
when he got any, just as her willful sovereignty fancied, and 
Rake rode on now with his master’s note, bearing no very good 
will to her; for Rake had very strong prejudices, and none 
stronger than against these fair pillagers who went about seek- 
ing whom they should devour, and laughing at the wholesale 
ruin that they wrought while the sentimentalists babbled in 
“ Social Science ” of “ pearls lost ” and “ innocence betrayed.” 

“ A girl that used to eat tripe and red herring in a six-pair 
back, and dance for a shilling a night in gauze, coming it so 
grand that she’ll only eat asparagus in March, and drink the 
best Brands with her truffles! Why, she aint worth sixpence 
thrown away on her, unless it’s worth while to hear how hard 
she can swear at you ! ” averred Rake, in his eloquence ; and 
he was undoubtedly right for that matter; but then — the Zu-Zu 
was the rage, and if ever she should be sold up, great ladies 
would crowd to her sale and buy with eager curiosity at high 
prices her most trumpery pots of pomatum, her most flimsy 
gew-gaws of marqueterie! 

Rake had seen a good deal of men and manners, and, in his 
own opinion at least, was “ up to every dodge on the cross ” 
that this iniquitous world could unfold. A bright, lithe, ani- 
mated, vigorous, yellow-haired, and sturdy fellow; seemingly 


61 


UNDER THE KEEPER’S TREE. 

with a dash of the Celt in him that made him vivacious and 
peppery; Mr. Rake polished his wits quite as much as he pol- 
ished the tops, and considered himself a philosopher. Of whose 
son he was he had not the remotest idea; his earliest recol- 
lections were of the tender mercies of the workhouse; but even 
that chill foster-mother, the parish, had not damped the liveli- 
ness of his temper or the independence of his opinions, and as 
soon as he was fifteen Rake had run away and joined a circus; 
distinguishing himself there by his genius for standing on his 
head and tying his limbs into a porter’s knot. 

From the circus he migrated successively into the shape of 
a comic singer, a tapster, a navvy, a bill-sticker, a guacho in 
Mexico (working his passage out), a fireman in Mew York, a 
ventriloquist in Maryland, a vaquero in Spanish California, a 
lemonade seller in San Francisco, a revolutionist in the Ar- 
gentine (without the most distant idea what he fought for), a 
boatman on the Bay of Mapiri, a blacksmith in Santarem, 
a trapper in the Wilderness, and finally, working his passage 
home again, took the Queen’s shilling in Dublin, and was 
drafted into a light-cavalry regiment. With the — th he served 
half a dozen years in India; a rough-rider, a splendid fellow in 
a charge or a pursuit, with an astonishing power over horses, 
and the clearest back-handed sweep of a saber that ever cut 
down a knot of natives ; but — insubordinate. Do his duty when- 
ever fighting was in question, he did most zealously; but to 
kick over the traces at other times was a temptation that at 
last became too strong for that lawless lover of liberty. 

From the moment that he joined the regiment a certain 
Corporal Warne and he had conceived an antipathy to one an- 
other, which Rake had to control as he might, and which the 
Corporal was not above indulging in every petty piece of tyr- 
anny that his rank allowed him to exercise. On active service 
Rake was, by instinct, too good a soldier not to manage to keep 
the curb on himself tolerably well, though he was always re- 
garded in his troop rather as a hound that will “ riot ” is re- 
garded in the pack; but when the — th came back to Brighton 
and to barracks, the evil spirit of rebellion began to get a little 
hotter in him under the Corporal’s “ Idees Mapoliennes ” of 
justifiable persecution. Warne indisputably provoked his man 
in a cold, iron, strictly lawful sort of manner, moreover, all the 
more irritating to a temper like Rake’s. 

“ Hanged if I care how the officers come it over me ; they’re 


62 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


gentlemen, and it don’t try a fellow,” would Rake say in con- 
fidential moments over purl and a penn’orth of bird’s-eye, his 
experience in the Argentine Republic having left him with 
strongly aristocratic prejudices; “but when it comes to a duffer 
like that, that knows no better than me, what aint a bit better 
than me, and what is as clumsy a duffer about a horse’s plates 
as ever I knew, and would a’most let a young ’un buck him out 
of his saddle — why, then I do cut up rough, I aint denying it; 
and I don’t see what there is in his Stripes to give him such 
a license to be aggravating.” 

With which Rake would blow the froth off his pewter with 
a puff of concentrated wrath, and an oath against his non- 
commissioned officers that might have let some light in upon 
the advocates for “ promotion from the ranks,” had they been 
there to take the lesson. At last, in the leisure of Brighton, the 
storm broke. Rake had a Scotch hound that was the pride of 
his life ; his beer-money often going instead to buy dainties for 
the dog, who became one of the channels through which Warne 
could annoy and thwart him. The dog did no harm, being a 
fine, well-bred deerhound; but it pleased the Corporal to con- 
sider that it did, simply because it belonged to Rake, whose 
popularity in the corps, owing to his good nature, his good 
spirits, and his innumerable tales of American experiences and 
amorous adventures, increased the jealous dislike which his 
knack with an unbroken colt and his abundant stable science 
had first raised in his superior. 

One day in the chargers’ stables the hound ran out of a loose 
box with a rush to get at Rake, and upset a pailful of warm 
mash. The Corporal, who was standing by in harness, hit him 
over the head with a heavy whip he had in his hand ; infuriated 
by the pain, the dog flew at him, tearing his overalls with a 
fierce crunch of his teeth. “ Take the brute off, and string him 
up with a halter; I’ve put up with him too long! ” cried Warne 
to a couple of privates working near in their stable dress. Be- 
fore the words were out of his mouth Rake threw himself on 
him with a bound like lightning, and, wrenching the whip out 
of his hands, struck him a slashing, stinging blow across his 
face. 

“ Hang my hound, you cur ! If you touch a hair of him, I’ll 
double-thong you within an inch of your life ! ” 

And assuredly he would have kept his word, had he not been 
made a prisoner and marched off to the guardroom. 


63 


UNDER THE KEEPER^ TREE. 

Rake learned the stern necessity of the law, which, for the 
sake of morale, must make the soldiers, whose blood is wanted 
to be like fire on the field, patient, pulseless, and enduring of 
every provocation, cruelty, and insolence in the camp and bar- 
rack, as though they were statues of stone — a needful law, 
a wise law, an indispensable law, doubtless, but a very hard 
law to be obeyed by a man full of life and all life’s passions. 

At the court-martial on his mutinous conduct, which fol- 
lowed, many witnesses brought evidence, on being pressed, to 
the unpopularity of Warne in the regiment and to his harsh- 
ness and his tyranny to Rake. Many men spoke out what had 
been chained down in their thoughts for years; and, in con- 
sideration of the provocation received, the prisoner, who was 
much liked by the officers, was condemned to six months’ im- 
prisonment for his insubordination and blow to his superior 
officer, without being tied up to the triangles. At the court- 
martial, Cecil, who chanced to be in Brighton after Goodwood, 
was present one day with some other Guardsmen; and the look 
of Rake, with his cheerfulness under difficulties, his love for 
the hound, and his bright, sunburnt, shrewd, humorous coun- 
tenance, took his fancy. 

“ Beauty ” was the essence of good nature. Indolent him- 
self, he hated to see anything or anybody worried; lazy, gentle, 
wayward, and spoilt by his own world, he was still never so self- 
ish and philosophic as he pretended but what he would do a 
kindness, if one came in his way; it is not a very great virtue, 
perhaps, but it is a rare one. 

“ Poor devil ! struck the other because he wouldn’t have his 
dog hanged. Well, on my word, I should have done the same 
in his place, if I could have got up the pace for so much ex- 
ertion,” murmured Cecil to his cheroot, careless of the de- 
moralizing tendency of his remarks for the army in general. 
Had it occurred in the Guards, and he had “ sat ” on the case, 
Rake would have had one very lenient judge. 

As it was, Bertie actually went the lengths of thinking seri- 
ously about the matter; he liked Rake’s devotion to his dumb 
friend, and he heard of his intense popularity in his troop; he 
wished to save, if he could, so fine a fellow from the risks of 
his turbulent passion and from the stern fetters of a trying 
discipline; hence, when Rake found himself condemned to his 
cell, he had a message sent him by Bertie’s groom that, when 
his term of punishment should be over, Mr. Cecil would buy his 


64 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


discharge from the Service and engage him as extra body- 
servant, having had a good account of his capabilities; he had 
taken the hound to his own kennels. 

Now, the fellow had been thoroughly devil-may-care through- 
out the whole course of the proceedings, had heard his sentence 
with sublime impudence, and had chaffed his sentinels with an 
utterly reckless nonchalance; but somehow or other, when that 
message reached him, a vivid sense that he was a condemned 
and disgraced man suddenly flooded in on him; a passionate 
gratitude seized him to the young aristocrat who had thought 
of him in his destitution and condemnation, who had even 
thought of his dog; and Rake, the philosophic and the un- 
dauntable, could have found it in his heart to kneel down in 
the dust and kiss the stirrup-leather when he held it for his new 
master, so strong was the loyalty he bore from that moment to 
Bertie. 

Martinets were scandalized at a Life-Guardsman taking as * 
his private valet a man who had been guilty of such conduct 
in the Light Cavalry; but Cecil never troubled his head about 
what people said; and so invaluable did Rake speedily become 
to him that he had kept him about his person wherever he went 
from then until now, two years after. 

Rake loved his master with a fidelity very rare in these days ; 
he loved his horses, his dogs, everything that was his, down 
to his very rifle and boots; slaved for him cheerfully, and was 
as proud of the deer he stalked, of the brace he bagged, of his 
winnings when the Household played the Zingari, or his vic- 
tory when his yacht won the Cherbourg Cup, as though those 
successes had been Rake’s own. 

“ My dear Seraph,” said Cecil himself once, on this point, to 
the Marquis, “ if you want generosity, fidelity, and all the rest 
of the cardinal what-d’ye-call-’ems — sins, aint it? — go to a 
noble-hearted Scamp; he’ll stick to you till he kills himself. If 
you want to be cheated, get a Respectable Immaculate ; 
he’ll swindle you piously, and decamp with your Doncaster 
Vase.” 

And Rake, who assuredly had been an out-and-out scamp, 
made good Bertie’s creed ; he “ stuck to him ” devoutly, and 
no terrier was ever more alive to an otter than he was to the 
Guardsman’s interests. It was that very vigilance which made 
him, as he rode back from the Zu-Zu’s in the twilight, notice 
what would have escaped any save one who had been practiced 


UNDER THE KEEPER S TREE. 


65 


as a trapper in the red Canadian woods; namely, the head of 
a man, almost hidden among the heavy, though leafless, brush- 
wood and the yellow gorse of a spinney which lay on his left 
in Royallieu Park. Rake’s eyes were telescopic and micro- 
scopic; moreover, they had been trained to know such little 
signs as a marsh from a hen harrier in full flight, by the length 
of wing and tail, and a widgeon or a coot from a mallard or a 
teal, by the depth each swam out of the water. Gray and foggy 
as it was, and high as was the gorse, Rake recognized his born- 
foe Willon. 

“ What’s he up to there ? ” thought Rake, surveying the place, 
which was wild, solitary, and an unlikely place enough for a 
head groom to be found in. “If he aint a rascal, I never see 
one ; it’s my belief he cheats the stable thick and thin, and gets 
on Mr. Cecil’s mounts to a good tune — aye, and would nobble 
’em as soon as not, if it just suited his book. That blessed King 
hates the man ; how he lashes his heels at him ! ” 

It was certainly possible that Willon might be passing an 
idle hour in potting rabbits, or be otherwise innocently en- 
gaged enough ; but the sight of him, there among the gorse, was 
a sight of suspicion to Rake. Instantaneous thoughts darted 
through his mind of tethering his horse, and making a recon- 
noissance, safely and unseen, with the science at stalking brute 
or man that he had learned of his friends the Sioux. But sec- 
ond thoughts showed him that was impossible. The horse he 
was on was a mere colt just breaking in, who had barely had 
so much as a “dumb jockey” on his back; and stand for a sec- 
ond, the colt would not. 

“ At any rate, I’ll unearth him,” thought Rake, with his 
latent animosity to the head groom and his vigilant loyalty 
to Cecil overruling any scruple as to his right to overlook his 
foe’s movements; and with a gallop that was muffled on the 
heathered turf he dashed straight at the covert, unperceived till 
he was within ten paces. Willon started and looked up hastily; 
he was talking to a square-built man very quietly dressed in 
shepherd’s plaid, chiefly remarkable by a red-hued beard and 
whiskers. 

The groom turned pale, and laughed nervously as Rake pulled 
up with a jerk. 

“You on that young ’un again? Take care you don’t get 
bucked out o’ saddle in the shape of a cocked-hat.” 

“ I aint afraid of going to grass, if you are ! ” retorted Rake 


66 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


scornfully ; boldness was not his enemy’s strong point. “ Who’s 
your pal, old fellow ? ” 

“ A cousin o’ mine, out o’ Yorkshire,” vouchsafed Mr. Willon, 
looking anything but easy, while the cousin aforesaid nodded 
sulkily on the introduction. 

“Ah! looks like a Yorkshire tyke,” muttered Rake, with 
a volume of meaning condensed in these innocent words. “ A 
nice, dry, cheerful sort of place to meet your cousin in, too; 
uncommon lively; hope it ’ll raise his spirits to see all his 
cousins a-grinning there; his spirits don’t seem much in sorts 
now,” continued the ruthless inquisitor, with a glance at the 
“ keeper’s tree ” by which they stood, in the middle of dank 
undergrowth, whose branches were adorned with dead cats, curs, 
owls, kestrels, stoats, weasels, and martens. To what issue the 
passage of arms might have come it is impossible to say, for 
at that moment the colt took matters into his own hands, and 
bolted with a rush that even Rake could not pull in till he had 
had a mile-long “ pipe-opener.” 

“ Something up there,” thought that sagacious rough-rider ; 
“ if that red-haired chap aint a rum lot. I’ll eat him. I’ve seen 
his face, too, somewhere ; where the deuce was it ? Cousin ; yes, 
cousins in Queer Street, I dare say! Why should he go and 
meet his ‘ cousin ’ out in the fog there, when, if you took twenty 
cousins home to the servants’ hall, nobody’d ever say anything ? 
If that Willon aint as deep as Old Harry ” 

And Rake rode into the stable-yard, thoughtful and intensely 
suspicious of the rendezvous under the keeper’s tree in the out- 
lying coverts. He would have been more so had he guessed that 
Ren Davis’ red beard and demure attire, with other as efficient 
disguises, had prevented even his own keen eyes from penetrat- 
ing the identity of Willon’s “ cousin ” with the welsher he had 
seen thrust off the course the day before by his master. 





CHAPTER VI. 


THE END OF A RINGING RUN. 

“ Tally-ho ! is the word, clap spurs and let’s follow. 
The world has no charm like a rattling view-halloa ! ” 


Is hardly to be denied by anybody in this land of fast 
bursts and gallant M. F. H.’s, whether they “ ride to hunt,” 
or “ hunt to ride,” in the immortal distinction of Assheton 
Smith’s old whip : the latter class, by the bye, becoming far and 
away the larger, in these days of rattling gallops and desperate 
breathers. Who cares to patter after a sly old dog fox, that, 
fat and wary, leads the pack a tedious, interminable wind, in and 
out through gorse and spinney, bricks himself up in a drain, 
and takes an hour to be dug out, dodges about till twilight, and 
makes the hounds pick the scent slowly and wretchedly over 
marsh and through water? Who would not give fifty guineas 
a second for the glorious thirty minutes of racing that show 
steam and steel over fence and fallow in a clipping rush, without 
a check from find to finish? So be it ever! The riding that 
graces the Shires, that makes Tedworth and Pytchley, the 
Duke’s and the Fitzwilliam’s, household words and “ names be- 
loved ” — that fills Melton and Market Harborough, and makes 
the best flirts of the ballroom gallop fifteen miles to covert, care- 
less of hail or rain, mire or slush, mist or cold, so long as it is 
a fine scenting wind — is the same riding that sent the Six Hun- 
dred down into the blaze of the Muscovite guns; that in our 
fathers’ days gave to Grant’s Hussars their swoop, like eagles, 
on to the rearguard at Morales, and that, in the grand old East 
and the rich trackless West, makes exiled campaigners with 
high English names seek and win an aristeia of their own at the 
head of their wild Irregular Horse, who would charge hell itself 
at their bidding. 

Now in all the Service there was not a man who loved hunt- 
ing better than Bertie. Though he was incorrigibly lazy, and 
inconceivably effeminate in every one of his habits; though he 
suggested a portable lounging-chair as an improvement at bat- 

67 


68 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


tues, so that you might shoot sitting; drove to every breakfast 
and garden party in the season in his brougham with the blinds 
down lest a grain of dust should touch him; thought a waltz 
too exhaustive, and a saunter down Pall Mall too tiring, and 
asked to have the end of a novel told him in the clubs, because 
it was too much trouble to read on a warm day; though he 
was more indolent than any spoiled Creole — “ Beauty ” never 
failed to head the first flight, and adored a hard day cross coun- 
try, with an east wind in his eyes and the sleet in his teeth. 
The only trouble was to make him get up in time for it. 

“ Mr. Cecil, sir ; if you please, the drag will be round in ten 
minutes,” said Rake, with a dash of desperation for the seventh 
time into his chamber, one fine scenting morning. 

“ I don’t please,” answered Cecil sleepily, finishing his cup 
of coffee, and reading a novel of La Demirep’s. 

“ The other gentlemen are all down, sir, and you will be too 
late.” 

“Not a bit. They must wait for me,” yawned Bertie. 

Crash came the Seraph’s thunder on the panels of the door, 
and a strong volume of Turkish through the keyhole: “Beauty, 
Beauty, are you dead ? ” * 

“ Now, what an inconsequent question ! ” expostulated Cecil, 
with appealing rebuke. “ If a fellow were dead, how the devil 
could he say he was? Do be logical, Seraph.” 

“ Get up ! ” cried the Seraph with a deafening rataplan, and 
a final dash of his colossal stature into the chamber. “ We’ve 
all done breakfast; the traps are coming round; you’ll be an 
hour behind time at the meet.” 

Bertie lifted his eyes with plaintive resignation from the 
Demirep’s yellow-papered romance. 

“ I’m really in an interesting chapter : Aglae has just had 
a marquis kill his son, and two brothers kill each other in the 
Bois, about her, and is on the point of discovering a man she’s 
in love with to be her own grandfather; the complication is 
absolutely thrilling,” murmured Beauty, whom nothing could 
ever “ thrill ” — not even plunging down the Matterhorn, losing 
“ long odds in thou’ ” over the Oaks, or being sunned in the eyes 
of the fairest woman of Europe. 

The Seraph laughed, and tossed the volume straight to the 
other end of the chamber. 

“ Confound you, Beauty; get up! ” 

“Never swear, Seraph; not ever so mildly,” yawned Cecil; 


THE END OF A RINGING RUN. 


69 


<l it’s gone out, you know ; only the cads and the clergy can 
damn one nowadays; it’s such bad style to be so impulsive. 
Look ! you have broken the back of my Demirep ! ” 

“ You deserve to break the King’s back over the first cropper,” 
laughed the Seraph. “ Do get up ! ” 

“ Bother ! ” sighed the victim, raising himself with reluctance, 
while the Seraph disappeared in a cloud of Turkish. 

Neither Bertie’s indolence nor his insouciance was assumed; 
utter carelessness was his nature, utter impassibility was his 
habit, and he was truly for the moment loath to leave his bed, 
his coffee, and his novel; he must have his leg over the saddle, 
and feel the strain on his arms of that “ pulling ” pace with 
which the King always went when once he settled into his 
stride, before he would really think about winning. 

The hunting breakfasts of our forefathers and of our present 
squires found no favor with Bertie; a slice of game and a glass 
of Curagoa were all he kept the drag waiting to swallow; and 
the four bays going at a pelting pace, he and the rest of the 
Household who were gathered at Royallieu were by good luck 
in time for the throw-off of the Quorn, where the hero of the 
Blue Ribbon was dancing impatiently under Willon’s hand, 
scenting the fresh, keen, sunny air, and knowing as well what 
all those bits of scarlet straying in through field and lane, gate 
and gap, meant, as well as though the merry notes of the mas- 
ter’s horn were winding over the gorse. The meet was brilliant 
and very large; showing such a gathering as only the Melton 
country can ; and foremost among the crowd of carriages, hacks, 
and hunters, were the beautiful roan mare Vivandiere of the 
Lady Guenevere, mounted by that exquisite peeress in her violet 
habit and her tiny velvet hat; and the pony equipage of the 
Zu-Zu, all glittering with azure and silver, leopard rugs, and 
snowy reins: the breadth of half an acre of grassland was be- 
tween them, but the groups of men about them were tolerably 
equal for number and for rank. 

“ Take Zu-Zu off my hands for this morning, Seraph ; there’s 
a good fellow,” murmured Cecil, as he swung himself into sad- 
dle. The Seraph gave a leonine growl, sighed, and acquiesced. 
He detested women in the hunting-field, but that sweetest tem- 
pered giant of the Brigades never refused anything to any- 
body — much less to “ Beauty.” 

To an uninitiated mind it would have seemed marvelous and 
beautiful in its combination of simplicity and intricacy, to have 


70 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


noted the delicate tactics with which Bertie conducted him- 
self between his two claimants — bending to his Countess with 
a reverent devotion that assuaged whatever of incensed per- 
ception of her unacknowledged rival might be silently lurking 
in her proud heart; wheeling up to the pony- trap under cover 
of speaking to the men from Egerton Lodge, and restoring the 
Zu-Zu from sulkiness, by a propitiatory offer of a little gold 
sherry-flask, studded with torquoises, just ordered for her from 
Regent Street, which, however, she ungraciously contemned, be- 
cause she thought it had only cost twenty guineas; anchoring 
the victimized Seraph beside her by an adroit “ Ah ! by the way, 
Rock, give Zu-Zu one of your rose-scented papelitos; she’s been 
wild to smoke them ” ; and leaving the Zu-Zu content at secur- 
ing a future Duke, was free to canter back and flirt on the off- 
side of Vivandiere, till the “ signal,” the “ cast,” made with 
consummate craft, the waving of the white sterns among the 
brushwood, the tightening of girths, the throwing away of 
cigars, the challenge, the whimper, and the “ stole away ! ” sent 
the field headlong down the course after as fine a long-legged 
greyhound fox as ever carried a brush. 

Away he went in a rattling spin, breaking straight at once 
for the open, the hounds on the scent like mad: with a tally-ho 
that thundered through the cloudless, crisp, cold, glittering 
noon, the field dashed off pell-mell ; the violet habit of her lady- 
ship, and the azure skirts of the Zu-Zu foremost of all in the 
rush through the spinneys; while Cecil on the King, and the 
Seraph on a magnificent white weight-carrier, as thoroughbred 
and colossal as himself, led the way with them. The scent was 
hot as death in the spinneys, and the pack raced till nothing 
but a good one could live with them; few but good ones, how- 
ever, were to be found with the Quorn, and the field held to- 
gether superbly over the first fence, and on across the grass- 
land, the game old fox giving no sign of going to covert, but 
running straight as a crow flies, while the pace grew terrific. 

“ Beats cock-fighting ! ” cried the Zu-Zu, while her blue skirts 
fluttered in the wind, as she lifted Cecil’s brown mare, very 
cleverly, over a bilberry hedge, and set her little white teeth 
with a will on the Seraph’s attar-of-rose cigarette. Lady Guene- 
vere heard the words as Vivandiere rose in the air with the 
light bound of a roe, and a slight superb dash of scorn came 
into her haughty eyes for the moment; she never seemed to 
know that “ that person ” in the azure habit even existed, but 


THE END OF A KIN 


71 


the contempt awoke in her, and shone , while she 

rode on as that fair leader of the Belvt L ichJey alone 
could ride over the fallows. 

The steam was on at full pressure, the L close to 

his brush, — heads up, sterns down, — running . traight as an 
arrow over the open, past coppice and covert, through gorse and 
spinney, without a sign of the fox making for shelter. Fence 
and double, hedge and brook, soon scattered the field; straying 
off far and wide, and coming to grief with lots of “ downers,” 
it grew select, and few but the crack men could keep the hounds 
in view. “ Catch ’em who can,” was the one mot d’ordre, for 
they were literally racing; the line-hunters never losing the 
scent a second, as the fox, taking to dodging, made all the 
trouble he could for them through the rides of the woods. 
Their working was magnificent, and, heading him, they ran him 
round and round in a ring, viewed him for a second, and drove 
him out of covert once more into the pastures, while they laid 
on at a hotter scent and flew after him like staghounds. 

Only half a dozen were up with them now; the pace was tre- 
mendous, though all over grass ; here a flight of posts and rails 
tried the muscle of the boldest; there a bullfinch yawned be- 
hind the blackthorn; here a big fence towered; there a brook 
rushed angrily among its rushes; while the keen, easterly wind 
blew over the meadows, and the pack streamed along like the 
white trail of a plume. Cecil “ showed the way ” with the self- 
same stride and the self-same fencing as had won him the 
Vase. Lady Guenevere and the Seraph were running almost 
even with him ; three of the Household farther down ; the Zu-Zu 
and some Melton men two meadows off; the rest of the field, 
nowhere. Fifty-two minutes had gone by in that splendid run- 
ning, without a single check, while the fox raced as gamely and 
as fast as at the find; the speed was like lightning past the 
brown woods, the dark-green pine plantations, the hedges, bright 
with scarlet berries; through the green low-lying grasslands, 
and the winding drives of coverts, and the boles of ash-hued 
beech trunks, whose roots the violets were just purpling with 
their blossom; while far away stretched the blue haze of the 
distance, and above-head a flight of rooks cawed merrily in the 
bright air, soon left far off as the pack swept onward in the 
most brilliant thing of the hunting year. 

“Water! take care!” cried Cecil, with a warning wave of 
his hand as the hounds, with a splash like a torrent, dashed 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


72 

up to their necks in a broad, brawling brook that Reynard had 
swam in first-rate style, and struggled as best they could after 
him. It was an awkward bit, with bad taking-off and a villainous 
mud-bank for landing; and the water, thickened and swollen 
with recent rains, had made all the land that sloped to it miry 
and soft as sponge. It was the risk of life and limb to try it; 
but all who still viewed the hounds, catching Bertie’s shout of 
warning, worked their horses up for it, and charged toward it 
as hotly as troops charge a square. Forest King was over like 
a bird ; the winner of the Grand Military was not to be daunted 
by all the puny streams of the Shires; the artistic riding of 
the Countess landed Vivandiere, with a beautiful clear spring, 
after him by a couple of lengths : the Seraph’s handsome white 
hunter, brought up at a headlong gallop with characteristic care- 
less dash and fine science mingled, cleared it; but, falling with 
a mighty crash, gave him a purler on the opposite side, and 
was within an ace of striking him dead with his hoof in frantic 
struggles to recover. The Seraph, however, was on his legs with 
a rapidity marvelous in a six-foot-three son of Anak, picked up 
the horse, threw himself into saddle, and dashed off again quick 
as lightning, with his scarlet stained all over, and his long 
fair mustaches floating in the wind. The Zu-Zu turned Mother 
of Pearl back with a fiery French oath; she hated to be “cut 
down,” but she liked still less to risk her neck ; and two of the 
Household were already treated to “ crackers ” that disabled 
them for the day, while one Melton man was pitched head- 
foremost into the brook, and another was sitting dolorously on 
the bank with his horse’s head in his lap, and the poor brute’s 
spine broken. There were only three of the first riders in Eng- 
land now alone with the hounds, who, with a cold scent as the 
fox led them through the angular corner of a thick pheasant 
covert, stuck like wax to the line, and working him out, viewed 
him once more, for one wild, breathless, tantalizing second ; and, 
on a scent breast-high, raced him with the rush of an express 
through the straggling street of a little hamlet, and got him 
out again on the level pastures and across a fine line of hunt- 
ing country, with the leafless woods and the low gates of a park 
far away to their westward. 

“ A guinea to a shilling that we kill him,” cried the flute- 
voice of her brilliant ladyship, as she ran a moment side by side 
with Forest King, and flashed her rich eyes on his rider; she 
had scorned the Zu-Zu, but on occasion she would use betting 


THE END OF A RINGING RUN 


73 


slang and racing slang with the daintiest grace in the world 
herself, without their polluting her lips. As though the old fox 
heard the wager, he swept in a bend round toward the woods 
on the right; making, with all the craft and the speed there 
were in him, for the deep shelter of the boxwood and laurel. 
“ After him, my beauties, my beauties — if he run there he’ll go 
to ground and save his brush ! ” thundered the Seraph, as though 
he were hunting his own hounds at Lyonnesse, who knew every 
tone of his rich clarion notes as well as they knew every wind 
of his horn. But the young ones of the pack saw Reynard’s 
move' and his meaning as quickly as he did; having run fast 
before, they flew now; the pace was terrific. Two fences were 
crossed as though they were paper; the meadows raced with 
lightning speed, a ha-ha leaped, a gate cleared with a crashing 
jump, and in all the furious excitement of “ view,” they tore 
down the mile-long length of an avenue, dashed into a flower 
garden, and smashing through a gay trellis-work of scarlet 
creeper, plunged into the home-paddock and killed with as loud 
a shout ringing over the country in the bright, sunny day as 
ever was echoed by the ringing cheers of the Shire; Cecil, the 
Seraph, and her victorious ladyship alone coming in for the 
glories of the “ finish.” 

“ Never had a faster seventy minutes up-wind,” said Lady 
Guenevere, looking at the tiny jeweled watch, the size of a 
sixpence, that was set in the handle of her whip, as the brush, 
with all the compliments customary, was handed to her. She 
had won twenty before. 

The park so unceremoniously entered belonged to a baronet, 
‘who, though he hunted little himself, honored the sport and 
scorned a vulpecide; he came out naturally and begged them to 
lunch. Lady Guenevere refused to dismount, but consented to 
take a biscuit and a little Lafitte, while clarets, liqueurs, and 
ales, with anything else they wanted, were brought to her com- 
panions. The stragglers strayed in; the M. F. H. came up just 
too late; the men, getting down, gathered about the Countess 
or lounged on the gray stone steps of the Elizabethan house. 
The sun shone brightly on the oriole casements, the antique 
gables, the twisted chimneys, all covered with crimson para- 
sites and trailing ivy; the horses, the scarlet, the pack in the 
paddock adjacent, the shrubberies of laurel and araucaria, the 
sun-tinted terraces, made a bright and picturesque grouping. 
Bertie, with his hand on Vivandiere’s pommel, after taking a 


74 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


deep draught of sparkling Rhenish, looked on at it all with a 
pleasant sigh of amusement. 

“By Jove!” he murmured softly, with a contented smile 
about his lips, “ that was a ringing run ! ” 

At that very moment, as the words were spoken, a groom 
approached him hastily ; his young brother, whom he had 
scarcely seen since the find, had been thrown and taken home 
on a hurdle; the injuries were rumored to be serious. 

Bertie’s smile faded, he looked very grave; world-spoiled as 
he was, reckless in everything, and egotist though he had long 
been by profession, he loved the lad. 

When he entered the darkened room, with its faint chloro- 
form odor, the boy lay like one dead, his bright hair scattered 
on the pillow, his chest bare, and his right arm broken and 
splintered. The deathlike coma was but the result of the chlo- 
roform ; but Cecil never stayed to ask or remember that ; he was 
by the couch in a single stride, and dropped down by it, his head 
bent on his arms. 

u It was my fault. I should have looked to him.” 

The words were very low; he hated that any should see he 
could still be such a fool as to feel. A minute, and he con- 
quered himself; he rose, and with his hand on the boy’s fair 
tumbled curls, turned calmly to the medical men who, attached 
to the household, had been on the spot at once. 

“ What is the matter ? ” 

“Fractured arm, contusion; nothing serious, nothing at all, 
at his age,” replied the surgeon. “ When he wakes out of the 
lethargy he will tell you so. himself, Mr. Cecil.” 

“ You are certain? ” — do what he would his voice shook a lit- 
tle ; his hand had not shaken, two days before, when nothing less 
than ruin or ransom had hung on his losing or winning the race. 

“ Perfectly certain,” answered the surgeon cheerfully. “ He 
is not overstrong, to be sure, but the contusions are slight; he 
will be out of that bed in a fortnight.” 

“How did he fall?” 

But while they told him he scarcely heard; he was looking 
at the handsome Antinous-like form of the lad as it lay stretched 
helpless and stricken before him; and he was remembering the 
death-bed of their mother, when the only voice he had ever 
reverenced had whispered, as she pointed to the little child of 
three summers : “ When you are a man take care of him, Bertie.” 


THE END OF A RINGING RUN. 75 

How had he fulfilled the injunction? Into how much brilliantly 
tinted evil had he not. led him — by example, at least? 

The surgeon touched his arm apologetically, after a length- 
ened silence : 

“ Your brother will be best unexcited when he comes to him- 
self, sir; look — his eyes are unclosing now. Could you do me 
the favor to go to his lordship? His grief made him perfectly 
wild — so dangerous to his life at his age. We could only per- 
suade him to retire, a few minutes ago, on the plea of Mr. 
Berkeley’s safety. If you could see him ” 

Cecil went, mechanically almost, and with a grave, weary 
depression on him; he was so unaccustomed to think at all, so 
utterly unaccustomed to think painfully, that he scarcely knew 
what ailed him. Had he had his old tact about him, he would 
have known how worse than useless it would be for him to seek 
his father in such a moment. 

Lord Royallieu was lying back exhausted as Cecil opened the 
door of his private apartments, heavily darkened and heavily 
perfumed ; at the turn of the lock he started up eagerly. 

“ What news of him ? ” 

“ Good news, I hope,” said Cecil gently, as he came forward. 
“ The injuries are not grave, they tell me. I am so sorry that 
I never watched his fencing, but ” 

The old man had not recognized him till he heard his voice, 
and he waved him off with a fierce, contemptuous gesture; the 
grief for his favorite’s danger, the wild terrors that his fears 
had conjured up, his almost frantic agony at the sight of the 
accident, had lashed him into passion well-nigh delirious. 

“ Out of my sight, sir,” he said fiercely, his mellow tones 
quivering with rage. “ I wish to God you had been dead in a 
ditch before a hair of my boy’s had been touched. You live, and 
he lies dying there ! ” 

Cecil bowed in silence; the brutality of the words wounded, 
but they did not offend him, for he knew his father was in 
that moment scarce better than a maniac, and he was touched 
with the haggard misery upon the old Peer’s face. 

“ Out of my sight, sir,” re-echoed Lord Royallieu as he 
strode forward, passion lending vigor to his emaciated frame, 
while the dignity of his grand carriage blent with the furious 
force of his infuriated blindness. “ If you had had the heart 
of a man, you would have saved such a child as that from his 
peril; warned him, watched him, succored him at least when 


76 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


lie fell. Instead of that, you ride on and leave him to die, if 
death comes to him! You are safe, you are always safe. You 
try to kill yourself with every vice under heaven, and only get 
more strength, more grace, more pleasure from it — you are 
always safe because I hate you. Yes ! I hate you, sir! ” 

No words can give the force, the malignity, the concentrated 
meaning with which the words were hurled out, as the majestic 
form of the old Lord towered in the shadow, with his hands 
outstretched as if in imprecation. 

Cecil heard him in silence, doubting if he could hear aright, 
while the bitter phrases scathed and cut like scourges, but he 
bowed once more with the manner that was as inseparable from 
him as his nature. 

“ Hate is so very exhausting ; I regret I give you the trouble 
of it. May I ask why you favor me with it ? ” 

“You may!” thundered his father, while his hawk’s eyes 
flashed their glittering fire. “ You are like the man I cursed 
living and curse dead. You look at me with Alan Bertie’s eyes, 
you speak to me with Alan Bertie’s voice; I loved your mother, 
I worshiped her ; but — you are his son, not mine ! ” 

The secret doubt, treasured so long, was told at last. The 
blood flushed Bertie’s face a deep and burning scarlet; he 
started with an irrepressible tremor, like a man struck with 
a shot; he felt like one suddenly stabbed in the dark by a sure 
and a cruel hand. The insult and the amazement of the words 
seemed to paralyze him for the moment, the next he recovered 
himself, and lifted his head with as haughty a gesture as his 
father’s, his features perfectly composed again, and sterner than 
in all his careless, easy life they ever yet had looked. 

“ You lie, and you know that you lie. My mother was pure 
as the angels. Henceforth you can be only to me a slanderer 
who has dared to taint the one name holy in my sight.” 

And without another word, he turned and went out of the 
chamber. Yet, as the door closed, old habit was so strong on 
him that, even in his hot and bitter pain, and his bewildered 
sense of sudden outrage, he almost smiled at himself. “ It is 
a mania ; he does not know what he says,” he thought. “ How 
could I be so melodramatic? We were like two men at the Porte 
St. Martin. Inflated language is such bad form ! ” 

But the cruel stroke had not struck the less closely home, 
and gentle though his nature was, beyond all forgiveness from 
him was the dishonor of his mother’s memory. 


CHAPTER VII. 


AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER. 

It was the height of the season, and the duties of the House- 
hold were proportionately and insupportably heavy. The Bri- 
gades were fairly worked to death, and the Indian service, in 
the heat of the Afghan war, was never more onerous than the 
campaigns that claimed the Guards from Derby to Ducal. 

Escorts to Levees, guards of honor to Drawing rooms, or field- 
days in the Park and the Scrubs, were but the least portion of 
it. Ear more severe, and still less to be shirked, were the morn- 
ing exercise in the Ride; the daily parade in the Lady’s Mile; 
the reconnoissances from club windows, the vedettes at Flirta- 
tion Corner; the long campaigns at mess-breakfasts, with the 
study of dice and baccarat tactics, and the fortifications of 
Strasburg pate against the invasions of Chartreuse and Cham- 
bertin; the breathless, steady charges of Belgravian staircases 
when a fashionable drum beat the rataplan ; the skirmishes with 
sharpshooters of the bright-eyed Irregular Lancers; the forag- 
ing duty when fair commanders wanted ices or strawberries at 
garden parties; the ball-practice at Hornsey Handicaps; the 
terrible risk of crossing into the enemy’s lines, and being made 
to surrender as prisoners of war at the jails of St. George’s, or 
of St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge ; the constant inspections of the 
Flying Battalions of the Ballet, and the pickets afterward in 
the Wood of St. John; the anxieties of the Club commissariats, 
and the close vigilance over the mess wines ; the fatigue duty of 
ballrooms, and the continual unharnessing consequent on the 
clause in the Regulations never to wear the same gloves twice; 
all these, without counting the close battles of the Corner and 
the unremitting requirements of the Turf, worked the First 
Life and the rest of the Brigades, Horse and Foot, so hard and 
incessantly that some almost thought of changing into the 
dreary depot of St. Stephen’s; and one mutinous Coldstreamer 
was even rash enough and false enough to his colors to medi- 
tate deserting to the enemy’s camp, and giving himself up at 

77 


78 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


St. George’s — “ because a fellow once hanged is let alone, you 
know ! ” 

The Household were very hard pressed through the season 
—a crowded and brilliant one; and Cecil was in request most 
of all. Bertie, somehow or other, was the fashion — marvelous 
and indefinable word, that gives a more powerful crown than 
thrones, blood, beauty, or intellect can ever bestow. And no list 
was “ the thing ” without his name ; no reception, no garden 
party, no opera-box, or private concert, or rose-shadowed bou- 
doir, fashionably affiche without being visited by him. How he, 
in especial, had got his reputation it would have been hard to 
say, unless it were that he dressed a shade more perfectly than 
anyone, and with such inimitable carelessness in the perfec- 
tion, too, and had an almost unattainable matchlessness in the 
sangfroid of his soft, languid insolence, and incredible, though 
ever gentle, effrontery. However gained, he had it; and his 
beautiful hack Sahara, his mail-phaeton with two blood grays 
dancing in impatience over the stones, or his little dark-green 
brougham for night-work, were, one or another of them, al- 
ways seen from two in the day till four or five in the dawn 
about the park or the town. 

And yet this season, while he made a prima donna by a 
bravissima, introduced a new tie by an evening’s wear, gave 
a cook the cordon with his praise, and rendered a fresh-invented 
liqueur the rage by his recommendation, Bertie knew very well 
that he was ruined. 

The breach between his father and himself was irrevocable. 
He had left Boyallieu as soon as his guests had quitted it and 
young Berkeley was out of all danger. He had long known 
he could look for no help from the old lord, or from his elder 
brother, the heir; and now every chance of it was hopelessly 
closed; nothing but the whim or the will of those who held his 
floating paper, and the tradesmen who had his name on their 
books at compound interest of the heaviest, stood between him 
and the fatal hour when he must “ send in his papers to sell,” 
and be “ nowhere ” in the great race of life. 

He knew that a season, a month, a day, might be the only 
respite left him, the only pause for 'him ’twixt his glittering, 
luxurious world and the fiat of outlawry and exile. He knew 
that the Jews might be down on him any night that he sat 
at the Guards’ mess, flirted with foreign princesses, or laughed 
at the gossamer gossip of the town over iced drinks in the clubs. 


AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER. 


79 


His liabilities were tremendous, his resources totally exhausted ; 
but such was the latent recklessness of the careless Royallieu 
blood, and such the languid devil-may-care of his training and 
his temper, that the knowledge scarcely ever seriously dis- 
turbed his enjoyment of the moment. Somehow, he never 
realized it. 

If any weatherwise had told the Lisbon people of the com- 
ing of the great earthquake, do you think they could have 
brought themselves to realize that midnight darkness, that 
yawning desolation which were nigh, while the sun was still so 
bright and the sea so tranquil, and the bloom so sweet on purple 
pomegranate and amber grape, and the scarlet of odorous 
flowers, and the blush of a girl’s kiss-warmed cheek? 

A sentimental metaphor with which to compare the diffi- 
culties of a dandy of the Household, because his “ stiff ” was 
floating about in too many directions at too many high figures, 
and he had hardly enough till next pay-day came round to pur- 
chase the bouquets he sent and meet the club-fees that were 
due ! But, after all, may it not well be doubted if a sharp shock 
and a second’s blindness, and a sudden sweep down under the 
walls of the Cathedral or the waters of the Tagus, were not, 
on the whole, a quicker and pleasanter mode of extinction than 
that social earthquake — “ gone to the bad with a crash ” ? And 
the Lisbonites did not more disbelieve in, and dream less of 
their coming ruin than Cecil did his, while he was doing the 
season, with engagements enough in a night to spread over a 
month, the best horses in the town, a dozen rose-notes sent to 
his clubs or his lodgings in a day, and the newest thing in 
soups, colts, beauties, neckties, perfumes, tobaccos, or square 
dances waiting his dictum to become the fashion. 

“ How you do go on with those women, Beauty,” growled 
the Seraph, one day after a morning of fearful hard work con- 
sequent on having played the Foot Guards at Lord’s, and, in an 
unwary moment, having allowed himself to be decoyed after- 
ward to a private concert, and very nearly proposed to in con- 
sequence, during a Symphony in A; an impending terror from 
which he could hardly restore himself by puffing Turkish like 
a steam-engine, to assure himself of his jeopardized safety. 
“ You’re horribly imprudent ! ” 

“ Not a bit of it,” rejoined Beauty serenely. “ That is the 
superior wisdom and beautiful simplicity of making love to 
your neighbor’s wife — she can’t marry you ! ” 


80 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ But she may get you into the D. C.,” mused the Seraph, 
who had gloomy personal recollection of having been twice 
through that phase of law and life, and of having been enor- 
mously mulcted in damages because he was a Duke in futuro, 
and because, as he piteously observed on the occasion, “ You 
couldn’t make that fellow Cresswell see that it was they ran 
away with me each time ! ” 

“ Oh, everybody goes through the D. C. somehow or other,” 
answered Cecil, with philosophy. “ It’s like the Church, the 
Commons, and the Gallows, you know — one of the popular 
Institutions.” 

“ And it’s the only Law Court where the robber cuts a better 
figure than the robbed,” laughed the Seraph; consoling himself 
that he had escaped the future chance of showing in the latter 
class of marital defrauded, by shying that proposal during the 
Symphony in A, on which his thoughts ran, as the thoughts of 
one who ha^ just escaped from an Alpine crevasse run on the 
past abyss in which he had been so nearly lost forever. “ I say, 
Beauty; were you ever near doing anything serious — asking 
anybody to marry you, eh? I suppose you have been — they do 
make such awful hard running on one ! ” and the poor hunted 
Seraph stretched his magnificent limbs with the sigh of a mar- 
tyred innocent. 

“ I was once — only once ! ” 

“Ah, by Jove! and what saved you?” 

The Seraph lifted himself a little, with a sort of pitying,, 
sympathizing curiosity toward a fellow-sufferer. 

“ Well, I’ll tell you,” said Bertie, with a sigh as of a man 
who hated long sentences, and who was about to plunge into 
a painful past. “ Lt’s ages ago ; day I was at a Drawing room ; 
year Blue Ruin won the Clearwell for Royal, I think. Wedged 
up there, in that poking place, I saw such a face — the deuce, it 
almost makes me feel enthusiastic now. She was just out — an 
angel with a train! She had delicious eyes — like a spaniel’s, 
you know — a cheek like this peach, and lips like that straw- 
berry there, on the top of your ice. She looked at me, and I 
was in love ! I knew who she was — Irish lord’s daughter — girl 
I could have had for the asking; and I vow that I thought I 
would ask her — I actually was as far gone as that; I actually 
said to myself, I’d hang about her a week or two, and then pro- 
pose. You’ll hardly believe it, but I did! Watched her pre- 
sented; such grace, such a smile, such a divine lift of the 


AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER. 81 

lashes. I was really in love, and with a girl who would marry 
me ! I was never so near a fatal thing in my life ■” 

“Well?” asked the Seraph, pausing to listen till he let the 
ice in his sherry-cobbler melt away. When you have been so 
near breaking your neck down the Matrimonial Matterhorn, 
it is painfully interesting to hear how your friend escaped the 
same risks of descent. 

“ Well,” resumed Bertie, “ I was very near it. I did nothing 
but watch her; she saw me, and I felt she was as flattered and 
as touched as she ought to be. She blushed most enchantingly ; 
just enough, you know; she was conscious I followed her; I 
contrived to get close to her as she passed out, so close that 
I could see those exquisite eyes lighten and gleam, those ex- 
quisite lips part with a sigh, that beautiful face beam with the 
sunshine of a radiant smile. It was the dawn of love I had 
taught her ! I pressed nearer and nearer, and I caught her soft 
whisper as she leaned to her mother : ‘ Mamma, I’m so hungry ! 
I could eat a whole chicken ! 9 The sigh, the smile, the blush, 
the light, were for her dinner — not for me! The spell was 

broken forever. A girl whom I had looked at could think of 

wings and merry-thoughts and white sauce ! I have never been 
near a proposal again.” 

The Seraph, with the clarion roll of his gay laughter, flung 
a hautboy at him. 

“ Hang you, Beauty ! If I didn’t think you were going to 

tell one how you really got out of a serious thing; it is so 

awfully difficult to keep clear of them nowadays. Those before- 
dinner teas are only just so many new traps ! What became of 
her — eh ? ” 

“ She married a Scotch laird and became socially extinct, 
somewhere among the Hebrides. Served her right,” murmured 
Cecil sententiously. “ Only think what she lost just through 
hungering for a chicken; if I hadn’t proposed for her, — for 
one hardly keeps the screw up to such self-sacrifice as that 
when one is cool the next morning, — I would have made her 
the fashion ! ” 

With which masterly description in one phrase of all he could 
have done for the ill-starred debutante who had been hungry 
in the wrong place, Cecil lounged out of the club to drive with 
half a dozen of his set to a water-party — a Bacchanalian water- 
party, with the Zu-Zu and her sisters for the Naiads and the 
Household for their Tritons. 


82 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


A water-party whose water element apparently consisted in 
driving down to Richmond, dining at nine, being three hours 
over the courses, contributing seven guineas apiece for the 
repast, listening to the songs of the Cafe Alcazar, reproduced 
with matchless elan by a pretty French actress, being pelted 
with brandy cherries by the Zu-Zu, seeing their best cigars 
thrown away half-smoked by pretty pillagers, and driving back 
again to town in the soft, starry night, with the gay rhythms 
ringing from the box-seat as the leaders dashed along in a 
stretching gallop down the Kew Road. It certainly had no 
other more aquatic feature in it save a little drifting about for 
twenty minutes before dining, in toy boats and punts, as the 
sun was setting, while Laura Lelas, the brunette actress, sang 
a barcarolle that would have been worthy of mediaeval 

“ Venice, and her people, only born to bloom and droop.” 

It did not set Cecil thinking, however, after Browning’s 
fashion, 

„ “Where be all those 

Dear dead women, with such hair too; what’s become of all the gold 
Used to hang and brush their bosoms ? I feel chilly and grown old; ” 

because, in the first place, it was a canon with him never to 
think at all; in the second, if put to it he would have averred 
that he knew nothing of Venice, except that it was a musty old 
bore of a place, where they worried you about visas and luggage 
and all that, chloride of lim’d you if you came from the East, 
and couldn’t give you a mount if it were ever so; and, in the 
third, instead of longing for the dear dead women, he was 
entirely contented with the lovely living ones who were at that 
moment puffing the smoke of his scented cigarettes into his 
eyes, making him eat lobster drowned in Chablis, or pelting him 
with bonbons. 

As they left the Star and Garter, Laura Lelas, mounted on 
Cecil’s box-seat, remembered she had dropped her cashmere in 
the dining room. A cashmere is a Parisian’s soul, idol, and 
fetich; servants could not find it; Cecil, who, to. do him this jus- 
tice, was always as courteous to a comedienne as to a countess, 
went himself. Passing the open windows of another room, he 
recognized the face of his little brother among a set of young 
Civil Service fellows, attaches, and comets. They had no 
women with them; but they had brought what was perhaps. 


AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER. 83 

worse — dice for hazard — and were turning the unconscious Star 
and Garter into an impromptu Crockford’s over their wine. 

Little Berk’s pretty face was very flushed; his lips were set 
tight, his eyes were glittering ; the boy had the gambler’s passion 
of the Royallieu blood in its hottest intensity. He was play- 
ing with a terrible eagerness that went to Bertie’s heart with 
the same sort of pang of remorse with which he had looked 
on him when he had been thrown like dead on his bed at home. 

Cecil stopped and leaned over the open window. 

“ Ah, young one, I did not know you were here. We are 
going home; will you come?” he asked, with a careless nod 
to the rest of the young fellows. 

Berkeley looked up with a wayward, irritated annoyance. 

“No, I can’t,” he said irritably; “don’t you see we are play- 
ing, Bertie ? ” 

“ I see,” answered Cecil, with a dash of gravity, almost of 
sadness in him, as he learned farther over the windowsill with 
his cigar in his teeth. 

“ Come away,” he whispered kindly, as he almost touched the 
boy, who chanced to be close to the casement. “ Hazard is the 
very deuce for anybody; and you know Royal hates it. Come 
with us, Berk; there’s a capital set here, and I’m going to half 
a dozen good houses to-night, when we get back. I’ll take you 
with me. Come! you like waltzing, and all that sort of thing, 
you know.” 

The lad shook himself peevishly; a sullen cloud over his fair, 
picturesque, boyish face. 

“ Let me alone before the fellows,” he muttered impatiently. 
“ I won’t come, I tell you.” 

“ Soit!” 

Cecil shrugged his shoulders, left the window, found the Le- 
las’ cashmere, and sauntered back to the drags without any 
more expostulation. The sweetness of his temper could never 
be annoyed, but also he never troubled himself to utter useless 
words. Moreover, he had never been in his life much in earnest 
about anything; it was not worth while. 

“ A pretty fellow I am to turn preacher, when I have sins 
enough on my own shoulders for twenty,” he thought, as he 
shook the ribbons and started the leaders off to the gay music 
cf Laura Lelas’ champagne-tuned laughter. 

The thoughts that had crossed his mind when he had looked 
on his brother’s inanimate form had not been wholly forgotten 


84 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


since; he felt something like self-accusation whenever he saw, 
in some gray summer dawn, as he had seen now, the boy’s bright 
face, haggard and pale with the premature miseries of the 
gamester, or heard his half-piteous, half-querulous lamenta- 
tions over his losses; and he would essay, with all the consum- 
mate tact the world had taught him, to persuade him from his 
recklessness, and warn him of its consequences. But little 
Berk, though he loved his elder after a fashion, was wayward, 
selfish, and unstable as water. He would be very sorry some- 
times, very repentant, and would promise anything under the 
sun; but five minutes afterward he would go his own way just 
the same, and be as irritably resentful of interference as a 
proud, spoiled, still-childish temper can be. And Cecil — the 
last man in the world to turn mentor — would light a cheroot, 
as he did to-night, and forget all about it. The boy would 
be right enough when he had had his swing, he thought. Ber- 
tie’s philosophy was the essence of laissez-faire. 

He would have defied a Manfred, or an Aylmer of Aylmer’s 
Field, to be long pursued by remorse or care if he drank the 
right cru and lived in the right set. “ If it be very severe,” he 
would say, “ it may give him a pang once a twelvemonth — say 
the morning after a whitebait dinner. Repentance is generally 
the fruit of indigestion, and contrition may generally be traced 
to too many truffles or olives.” 

Cecil had no time or space for thought; he never thought; 
would not have thought seriously, for a kingdom. A novel, idly 
skimmed over in bed, was the extent of his literature; he never 
bored himself by reading the papers, he heard the news earlier 
than they told it; and as he lived, he was too constantly sup- 
plied from the world about him with amusement and variety 
to have to do anything beyond letting himself be amused; 
quietly fanned, as it were, with the lulling punka of social 
pleasure, without even the trouble of pulling the strings. He 
had naturally considerable talents, and an almost dangerous 
facility in them; but he might have been as brainless as a 
mollusk, for any exertion he gave his brain. 

“ If I were a professional diner-out, you know, I’d use such 
wits as I have : but why should I now ? ” he said on one occa- 
sion, when a fair lady reproached him with this inertia. “ The 
best style is only just to say yes or no — and be bored even in 
saying that — and a very comfortable style it is, too. You get 
amused without the trouble of opening your lips.” 


AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER. 


85 


“ But if everybody were equally monosyllabic, how then ? 
You would not get amused,” suggested his interrogator, a bril- 
liant Parisienne. 

“Well — everybody is, pretty nearly,” said Bertie; “but there 
are always a lot of fellows who give their wits to get their 
dinners — social rockets, you know — who will always fire them- 
selves off to sparkle instead of you, if you give them a white 
ball at the clubs, or get them a card for good houses. It saves 
you so much trouble; it is such a bore to have to talk.” 

He went that night, as he had said, to half a dozen good 
houses, midnight receptions, and after-midnight waltzes; mak- 
ing his bow in a Cabinet Minister’s vestibule, and taking up the 
thread of the same flirtation at three different balls; showing 
himself for a moment at a Premier’s At-home, and looking emi- 
nently graceful and pre-eminently weary in an ambassadress’ 
drawing room, and winding up the series by a dainty little 
supper in the gray of the morning, with a sparkling party of 
French actresses, as bright as the bubbles of their own Clicquot. 

When he went upstairs to his own bedroom, in Piccadilly, 
about five o’clock, therefore, he was both sleepy and tired, and 
lamented to that cherished and ever-discreet confidant, a 
cheroot, the brutal demands of the Service; which would drag 
him off, in five hours’ time, without the slightest regard to his 
feelings, to take share in the hot, heavy, dusty, scorching work 
of a field-day up at the Scrubs. 

“ Here — get me to perch as quick as you can, Bake,” he mur- 
mured, dropping into an armchair; astonished that Bake did 
not answer, he saw standing by him instead the boy Berkeley. 
Surprise was a weakness of raw inexperience that Cecil never 
felt; his gazette as Commander-in-Chief, or the presence of 
the Wandering Jew in his lodgings would never have excited 
it in him. In the first place, he would have merely lifted his 
eyebrows and said, “ Be a fearful bore ! ” in the second he would 
have done the same, and murmured, “ Queer old cad ! ” 

Surprised, therefore, he was not, at the boy’s untimely ap- 
parition; but his eyes dwelt on him with a mild wonder, while 
his lips dropped but one word: 

“ Amber- Amulet ? ” 

Amber- Amulet was a colt of the most marvelous promise at 
the Boyallieu establishment, looked on to win the next Clear- 
well, Guineas, and Derby as a certainty. An accident to the 
young chestnut was the only thing that suggested itself as of 


86 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


possibly sufficient importance to make his brother wait for him 
at five o’clock on a June morning. 

Berkeley looked up confusedly, impatiently: 

“ You are never thinking but of horses or women,” he said 
peevishly ; “ there may be other things in the world, surely.” 

“ Indisputably there are other things in the world, dear boy ; 
but none so much to my taste,” said Cecil composedly, stretch- 
ing himself with a yawn. “ With every regard to hospitality 
and the charms of your society, might I hint that five o’clock 
in the morning is not precisely the most suitable hour for social 
visits and ethical questions ? ” 

“For God’s sake, be serious, Bertie! I am the most misera- 
ble wretch in creation.” 

Cecil opened his closed eyes, with the sleepy indifference van- 
ished from them, and a look of genuine and affectionate concern 
on the serene insouciance of his face. 

“ Ah ! you would stay and play that chicken hazard,” he 
thought, but he was not one who would have reminded the boy 
of his own advice and its rejection ; he looked at him in silence 
a moment, then raised himself with a sigh. 

“ Dear boy, why didn’t you sleep upon it ? I never think of 
disagreeable things till they wake me with my coffee; then I 
take them up with the cup and put them down with it. You 
don’t know how well it answers; it disposes of them wonder- 
fully.” 

The boy lifted his head with a quick, reproachful anger, and 
in the gaslight his cheeks were flushed, his eyes full of tears. 

“How brutal you are, Bertie! I tell you I am ruined, and 
you care no more than if you were a stone. You only think 
of yourself ; you only live for yourself ! ” 

He had forgotten the money that had been tossed to him off 
that very table the day before the Grand Military; he had for- 
gotten the debts that had been paid for him out of the winnings 
of that very race. There is a childish, wayward, wailing temper, 
which never counts benefits received save as title-deeds by which 
to demand others. Cecil looked at him with just a shadow of 
regret, not reproachful enough to be rebuke, in his glance, but 
did pot defend himself in any way against the boyish, passionate 
accusation, nor recall his own past gifts into remembrance. 

“‘Brutal’! What a word, little one. Nobody’s brutal now; 
you never see that form nowadays. Come, what is the worst 
this time ? ” 


AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER. 


87 

Berkeley looked sullenly down on the table where his elbows 
leaned; scattering the rose-notes, the French novels, the ciga- 
rettes, and the gold essence-bottles with which it was strewn; 
there was something dogged yet agitated, half-insolent yet half- 
timidly irresolute, upon him, that was new there. 

“ The worst is soon told,” he said huskily, and his teeth chat- 
tered together slightly, as though with cold, as he spoke. “ I lost 
two hundred to-night; I must pay it, or be disgraced forever; 
I have not a farthing; I cannot get the money for my life; no 
Jews will lend to me, I am under age; and — and” — his voice 
sank lower and grew more defiant, for he knew that the sole 
thing forbidden him peremptorily by both his father and his 
brothers was the thing he had now to tell — “ and — I borrowed 
three ponies of Granville Lee yesterday, as he came from the 
Corner with a lot of banknotes after settling-day. I told him 
I would pay them to-morrow; I made sure I should have won 
to-night.” * 

The piteous unreason of the born gamester, who clings so 
madly to the belief that luck must come to him, and acts on that 
belief as though a bank were his to lose his gold from, was 
never more utterly spoken in all its folly, in all its pitiable 
optimism, than now in the boy’s confession. 

Bertie started from his chair, his sleepy languor dissipated; 
on his face the look that had come there when Lord Boyallieu 
had dishonored his mother’s name. In his code there was one 
shameless piece of utter and unmentionable degradation — it 
was to borrow of a friend. 

“ You will bring some disgrace on us before you die, 
Berkeley,” he said, with a keener inflection of pain and con- 
tempt than had ever been in his voice. “ Have you no common 
knowledge of honor ? ” 

The lad flushed under the lash of the words, but it was a 
flush of anger rather than of shame; he did not lift his eyes, 
but gazed sullenly down on the yellow paper of a Paris romance 
he was irritably dog-earing. 

“You are severe enough,” he said gloomily, and yet inso- 
lently. “ Are you such a mirror of honor yourself ? I suppose 
my debts, at the worst, are about one-fifth of yours.” 

For a moment even the sweetness of Cecil’s temper almost 
gave way. Be his debts what they would, there was not one 
among them to his friends, or one for which the law could not 
seize him. He was silent; he did not wish to have a scene of 


88 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


dissension with one who was but a child to him; moreover, it 
was his nature to abhor scenes of any sort, and to avert even a 
dispute, at any cost. 

He came back and sat down without any change of expression, 
putting his cheroot in his mouth. 

“ Tres cher, you are not courteous,” he said wearily; “but 
it may be that you are right. I am not a good one for you 
to copy from in anything except the fit of my coats; I don’t 
think I ever told you I was. I am not altogether so satisfied 
with myself as to suggest myself as a model for anything, un- 
less it were to stand in a tailor’s window in Bond Street to 
show the muffs how to dress. That isn’t the point, though; you 
say you want near £300 by to-morrow — to-day rather. I can 
suggest nothing except to take the morning mail to the Shires, 
and ask Koyal straight out; he never refuses you.” 

Berkeley looked at him with a bewildered terror that ban- 
ished at a stroke his sullen defiance; he was irresolute as a 
girl, and keenly moved by fear. 

“I would rather cut my throat,” he said, with a wild ex- 
aggeration that was but the literal reflection of the trepidation 
on him ; “ as I live I would ! I have had so much from him 
lately — you don’t know how much — and now of all times, 
when they threaten to foreclose the mortgage on Royal- 
lieu ” 

“ What ? F oreclose what ? ” 

“ The mortgage ! ” answered Berkeley impatiently ; to his 
childish egotism it seemed cruel and intolerable that any ex- 
tremities should be considered save his own. “ You know the 
lands are mortgaged as deeply as Monti and the entail would 
allow them. They threatened to foreclose — I think that’s the 
word — and Royal has had God knows what work to stave them 
them off. I no more dare face him, and ask him for a sovereign 
now than I dare ask him to give me the gold plate off the 
sideboard.” 

Cecil listened gravely; it cut him more keenly than he 
showed to learn the evils and the ruin that so closely menaced 
his house; and to find how entirely his father’s morbid mania 
against him severed him from all the interests and all the con- 
fidence of his family, and left him ignorant of matters even 
so nearly touching him as these. 

“ Your intelligence is not cheerful, little one,” he said, with 
a languid stretch of his limbs; it was his nature to glide off 


AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER. 89 

painful subjects. “And — I really am sleepy! You think there 
is no hope Royal would help you ? ” 

“ I tell you I will shoot myself through the brain rather than 
ask him.” 

Bertie moved restlessly in the soft depths of his lounging- 
chair; he shunned worry, loathed it, escaped it at every portal, 
and here it came to him just when he wanted to go to sleep. 
He could not divest himself of the feeling that, had his own 
career been different, — less extravagant, less dissipated, less in- 
dolently spendthrift, — he might have exercised a better influ- 
ence, and his brother’s young life might have been more pru- 
dently launched upon the world. He felt, too, with a sharper 
pang than he had ever felt it for himself, the brilliant beggary 
in which he lived, the utter inability he had to raise even the 
sum that the boy now needed; a sum so trifling, in his set and 
with his habits, that he had betted it over and over again in 
a clubroom, on a single game of whist. It cut him with a bitter, 
impatient pain; he was as generous as the winds, and there 
is no trial keener to such a temper than the poverty that 
paralyzes its power to give. 

“ It is no use to give you false hopes, young one,” he said 
gently. “I can do nothing! You ought to know me by this 
time ; and if you do, you know too that if the money was mine it 
should be yours at a word — if you don’t, no matter! Frankly, 
Berk, I am all down-hill; my bills may be called in any mo- 
ment ; when they are I must send in my papers to sell, and cut 
the country, if my duns don’t catch me before, which they 
probably will; in which event I shall be to all intents and pur- 
poses — dead. This is not lively conversation, but you will do 
me the justice to say that it was not I who introduced it. Only 
— one word for all, my boy; understand this: if I could help 
you I would, cost what it might, but as matters stand — I 
cannot.” 

And with that Cecil puffed a great cloud of smoke to en- 
velop him; the subject was painful, the denial wounded him 
by whom it had to be given full as much as it could wound him 
whom it refused. Berkeley heard it in silence; his head still 
hung down, his color changing, his hands nervously playing 
with the bouquet-bottles, shutting and opening their gold 
tops. 

“ No — y es — I know,” he said hurriedly ; “ I have no right to 
expect it, and have been behaving like a cur, and — and — all 


90 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


that, I know. But — there is one way you could save me, Bertie, 
if it isn’t too much for a fellow to ask.” 

“ I can’t say I see the way, little one,” said Cecil, with a sigh. 
“ What is it?” 

“ Why — look here. You see I’m not of age; my signature is 
of no use; they won’t take it; else I could get money in no 
time on what must come to me when Boyal dies; though 
’tisn’t enough to make the Jews ‘ melt ’ at a risk. Now — now — 
look here. I can’t see that there could be any harm in it. You 
are such chums with Lord Rockingham, and he’s as rich as 
all the Jews put together. What could there be in it if you 
just asked him to lend you a monkey for me? He’d do it in a 
minute, because he’d give his head away to you — they all say 
so — and he’d never miss it. Now, Bertie — will you? ” 

In his boyish incoherence and its disjointed inelegance the 
appeal was panted out rather than spoken; and while his head 
drooped and the hot color burned in his face, he darted a swift 
look at his brother, so full of dread and misery that it pierced 
Cecil to the quick as he rose from his chair and paced the 
room, flinging his cheroot aside; the look disarmed the reply 
that was on his lips, but his face grew dark. 

“ What you ask is impossible,” he said briefly. “ If I did 
such a thing as that, I should deserve to be hounded out of 
the Guards to-morrow.” 

The boy’s face grew more sullen, more haggard, more evil, 
as he still bent his eyes on the table, his glance not meeting 
his brother’s. 

“ You speak as if it would be a crime,” he muttered savagely, 
with a plaintive moan of pain in the tone; he thought himself 
cruelly dealt with and unjustly punished. 

“ It would be the trick of a swindler, and it would be the 
shame of a gentleman,” said Cecil, as briefly still. “ That is 
answer enough.” 

“ Then you will not do it ? ” 

“ I have replied already.” 

There was that in the tone, and in the look with which he 
paused before the table, that Berkeley had never heard or seen 
in him before; something that made the supple, childish, petu- 
lant, cowardly nature of the boy shrink and be silenced; some- 
thing for a single instant of the haughty and untamable tem- 
per of the Royallieu blood that awoke in the too feminine soft- 
ness and sweetness of Cecil’s disposition. 


AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER. 


91 


“ You said that you would aid me at any cost, and now that 
I ask you so wretched a trifle, you treat me as if I were a 
scoundrel,” he moaned passionately. “ The Seraph would give 
you the money at a word. It is your pride — nothing but pride. 
Much pride is worth to us who are penniless beggars ! ” 

“ If we are penniless beggars, by what right should we borrow 
of other men ? ” 

“ You are wonderfully scrupulous, all of a sudden! ” 

Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly and began to smoke 
again: He did not attempt to push the argument. His char- 
acter was too indolent to defend itself against aspersion, and 
horror of a quarrelsome scene far greater than his heed of mis- 
construction. 

“ You are a brute to me ! ” went on the lad, with his querulous 
and bitter passion rising almost to tears like a woman’s. “ You 
pretend you can refuse me nothing; and the moment I ask you 
the smallest thing you turn round on me, and speak as if I 
were the greatest blackguard on earth. You’ll let me go to the 
bad to-morrow rather than bend your pride to save me ; you live 
like a Duke, and don’t care if I should die in a debtor’s prison ! 
You only brag about ‘ honor ’ when you want to get out of 
helping a fellow; and if I were to cut my throat to-night you 
would only shrug your shoulders, and sneer at my death in the 
clubroom, with a jest picked out of your cursed French 
novels ! ” 

“ Melodramatic, and scarcely correct,” murmured Bertie. 

The ingratitude to himself touched him indeed but little; he 
was not given to making much of anything that was due to 
himself — partly through carelessness, partly through generosity ; 
but the absence in his brother of that delicate, intangible, in- 
describable sensitive-nerve which men call Honor, an absence 
that had never struck on him so vividly as it did to-night, 
troubled him, surprised him, oppressed him. 

There is no science that can supply this defect to the tem- 
perament created without it; it may be taught a counterfeit, 
but it will never own a reality. 

“ Little one, you are heated, and don’t know what you say,” 
he began very gently, a few moments later, as he leaned forward 
and looked straight in the boy’s eyes. “ Don’t be down about 
this ; you will pull through, never fear. Listen to me ; go down 
to Royal, and tell him all frankly. I know him better than 
you; he will be savage for a second, but he would sell every 


92 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


stick and stone on the land for your sake; he will see you safe 
through this. Only bear one thing in mind — tell him all. No 
half measures, no half confidences; tell him the worst, and ask 
his help. You will not come back without it.” 

Berkeley listened; his eyes shunning his brother’s, the red 
color darker on his face. 

“ Do as I say,” said Cecil, very gently still. “ Tell him, if you 
like, that it is through following my follies that you have come 
to grief ; he will be sure to pity you then.” 

There was a smile, a little sad, on his lips, as he said the 
last words, but it passed at once as he added: 

“ Do you hear me ? will you go ? ” 

“ If you want me — yes.” 

“ On your word, now ? ” 

“ On my word.” 

There was an impatience in the answer, a feverish eagerness 
in the way he assented that might have made the consent rather 
a means to evade the pressure than a genuine pledge to follow 
the advice; that darker, more evil, more defiant look, was still 
upon his face, sweeping its youth away and leaving in its stead 
a wavering shadow. He rose with a sudden movement ; his tum- 
bled hair, his disordered attire, his bloodshot eyes, his haggard 
look of sleeplessness and excitement in strange contrast with the 
easy perfection of Cecil’s dress and the calm languor of his 
attitude. The boy was very young, and was not seasoned to his 
life and acclimatized to his ruin, like his elder brother. He 
looked at him with a certain petulant envy; the envy of 
every young fellow for a man of the world. “ I beg your par- 
don for keeping you up, Bertie,” he said huskily. “ Good- 
night.” 

Cecil gave a little yawn. 

“ Dear boy, it would have been better if you could have come 
in with the coffee. Never be impulsive; don’t do a bit of good, 
and is such bad form ! ” 

He spoke lightly, serenely; both because such was as much 
his nature as it was to breathe, and because his heart was heavy 
that he had to send away the young one without help, though he 
knew that the course he had made him adopt would serve him 
more permanently in the end. But he leaned his hand a second 
on Berk’s shoulder, while for one single moment in his life he 
grew serious. 

“You must know I could not do what you asked; I could 


AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER. 93 

not meet any man in the Guards face to face if I sunk myself 
and sunk them so low. Can’t you see that, little one ? ” 

There was a wistfulness in the last words; he would gladly 
have believed that his brother had at length some perception 
of his meaning. 

“You say so, and that is enough,” said the boy pettishly; 
“ I cannot understand that I asked anything so dreadful ; but I 
suppose you have too many needs of your own to have any 
resources left for mine.” 

Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly again, and let him go. 
But he could not altogether banish a pang of pain at his heart, 
less even for his brother’s ingratitude than at his callousness 
to all those finer, better instincts of which honor is the con- 
crete name. 

For the moment, thought — grave, weary, and darkened 
— fell on him; he had passed through what he would have 
suffered any amount of misconstruction to escape — a disagree- 
able scene; he had been as unable as though he were a Com- 
missionaire in the streets to advance a step to succor the neces- 
sities for which his help had been asked; and he was forced, 
despite all his will, to look for the first time blankly in the face 
the ruin that awaited him. There was no other name for it: 
it would be ruin complete and wholly inevitable. His sig- 
nature would have been accepted no more by any bill-dis- 
counter in London; he had forestalled all, to the uttermost 
farthing; his debts pressed heavier every day; he could have no 
power to avert the crash that must in a few weeks, or at most 
a few months, fall upon him. And to him an utter blankness 
and darkness lay beyond. 

Barred out from the only life he knew, the only life that 
seemed to him endurable or worth the living; severed from all 
the pleasures, pursuits, habits, and luxuries of long custom; 
deprived of all that had become to him as second nature from 
childhood; sold up, penniless, driven out from all that he had 
known as the very necessities of existence; his very name for- 
gotten in the world of which he was now the darling; a man 
without a career, without a hope, without a refuge — he could not 
realize that this was what awaited him then; this was the fate 
that must within so short a space be his. Life had gone so 
smoothly with him, and his world was a world from whose sur- 
face every distasteful thought was so habitually excluded, that 
he could no more understand this desolation lying in wait for 


94 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


him than one in the fullness and elasticity of health can be- 
lieve the doom that tells him he will be a dead man before 
the sun has set. 

As he sat there, with the gas of the mirror branches glanc- 
ing on the gold and silver hilts of the crossed swords above the 
fireplace, and the smoke of his cheroot curling among the pile 
of invitation cards to all the best houses in town, Cecil could 
not bring himself to believe that things were really come 
to this pass with him. It is so hard for a man who has the 
magnificence of the fashionable clubs open to him day and 
night to beat into his brain the truth that in six months hence 
he may be lying in the debtors’ prison at Baden ; it is so difficult 
for a man who has had no greater care on his mind than to 
plan the courtesies of a Guards’ Ball or of a yacht’s summer- 
day banquet, to absolutely conceive the fact that in a year’s time 
he will thank God if he have a few francs left to pay for a 
wretched dinner in a miserable estaminet in a foreign bathing- 
place. 

“ It mayn’t come to that,” he thought ; “ something may hap- 
pen. If I could get my troop now, that would stave off the 
Jews; or, if I should win some heavy pots on the Prix de Dames, 
things would swim on again. I must win ; the King will be as 
fit as in the Shires, and there will only be the French horses 
between us and an absolute ‘ walk over.’ Things mayn’t come 
to the worst, after all.” 

And so careless and quickly oblivious, happily or unhappily, 
was his temperament, that he read himself to sleep with Ter- 
rains “ Club des V alets de Coeur,” and slept in ten minutes’ 
time as composedly as though he had inherited fifty thousand 
a year. 

That evening, in the loose-box down at Royallieu, F orest King 
stood without any body-covering, for the night was close and 
sultry ; a lock of the sweetest hay unnoticed in his rack, and 
his favorite wheaten-gruel standing uncared-for under his very 
nose; the King was in the height of excitation, alarm, and 
haughty wrath. His ears were laid flat to his head, his nostrils 
were distended, his eyes were glancing uneasily with a nervous, 
angry fire rare in him, and ever and anon he lashed out his 
heels with a tremendous thundering thud against the opposite 
wall, with a force that reverberated through the stables and 
made his companions start and edge away. It was precisely 


AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER. 95 

these companions that the aristocratic hero of the Soldiers’ Blue 
Ribbon scornfully abhorred. 

They had just been looking him over — to their own im- 
minent peril; and the patrician winner of the Vase, the brilliant 
six-year-old of Paris, and Shire and Spa steeple-chase fame, the 
knightly descendant of the White Cockade blood and of the 
coursers of Circassia, had resented the familiarity proportion- 
ately to his own renown and dignity. The King was a very 
sweet-tempered horse, a perfect temper, indeed, and ductile to 
a touch from those he loved; but he liked very few, and would 
suffer liberties from none. And of a truth his prejudices were 
very just; and if his clever heels had caught — as it was not 
his fault that they did not — the heads of his two companions, 
instead of coming with that ponderous crash into the panels of 
his box, society would certainly have been no loser, and his 
owner would have gained more than had ever before hung in the 
careless balance of his life. 

But the iron heels, with • their shining plates, only caught 
the oak of his box-door; and the tete-a-tete in the sultry, op- 
pressive night went on as the speakers moved to a prudent 
distance ; one of them thoughtfully chewing a bit of straw, after 
the immemorial habit of grooms, who ever seem as if they had 
been born into this world with a cornstalk ready in their mouths. 

“ It’s a’most a pity — he’s in such perfect condition. Tip-top. 
Cool as a cucumber after the longest pipe-opener; licks his oats 
up to the last grain ; leads the whole string such a rattling spin 
as never was spun but by a Derby cracker before him. It’s 
a’most a pity,” said Willon meditatively, eying his charge, the 
King, with remorseful glances. 

“ Prut — tush — tish ! ” said his companion, with a whistle in 
his teeth that ended with a “ damnation ! ” “ It ’ll only knock 
him over for the race ; he’ll be right as a trivet after it. What’s 
your little game; coming it soft like that, all of a sudden? You 
hate that ere young swell like p’ison.” 

“ Aye,” assented the head groom with a tigerish energy, 
viciously consuming his bit of straw. “ What for am I — head 
groom come nigh twenty years ; and to Markisses and Wiscounts 
afore him — put aside in that ere way for a fellow as he’s took 
into his service out of the dregs of a regiment; what was tied 
up at the triangles and branded D, as I know on, and sore 
suspected of even worse games than that, and now is that set 
up with pride and sich-like that nobody’s woice aint heard 


96 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


here except his ; I say what am I called on to bear it for ? ” and 
the head groom’s tones grew hoarse and vehement, roaring 
louder under his injuries. “ A man what’s attended a Duke’s 
’osses ever since he was a shaver, to b6 put aside for that 
workhus blackguard! A ’oss has a cold — it’s Rake’s mash what’s 
to be given. A ’oss is off his feed — it’s Rake what’s to weigh out 
the niter and steel. A ’oss is a buck- jumper — it’s Rake what’s 
to cure him. A ’oss is entered for a race — it’s Rake what’s to 
order his mornin’ gallops, and his go-downs o’ water. It’s past 
bearin’ to have a rascally chap what’s been and gone and turned 
walet, set up over one’s head in one’s own establishment, and 
let to ride the high ’oss over one, roughshod like that ! ” 

And Mr. Willon, in his disgust at the equestrian contumely 
thus heaped on him, bit the straw savagely in two, and made 
an end of it, with a vindictive “Will yer be quiet there; blow 
yer,” to the King, who was protesting with his heels against the 
conversation. 

“ Come, then, no gammon,” growled his companion — the 
“ cousin out o’ Yorkshire ” of the keeper’s tree. 

“What’s yer figure, you say?” relented Willon meditatively. 

“ Two thousand to nothin’ — come ! — can’t no handsomer,” re- 
torted the Yorkshire cousin, with the air of a man conscious 
of behaving very nobly. 

“For the race in Germany?” pursued Mr. Willon, still 
meditatively. 

“ Two thousand to nothin’ — come ! ” reiterated the other, 
with his arms folded to intimate that this and nothing else was 
the figure to which he would bind himself. 

Willon chewed another bit of straw, glanced at the horse as 
though he were a human thing to hear, to witness, and to judge; 
grew a little pale; and stooped forward. 

“ Hush ! Somebody ’ll spy on us. It’s a bargain.” 

“ Done ! And you’ll paint him, eh ? ” 

“ Yes— I’ll— paint him.” 

The assent was very husky, and dragged slowly out, while 
his eyes glanced w T ith a furtive, frightened glance over the 
loose-box. Then — still with that cringing, terrified look back- 
ward to the horse, as an assassin may steal a glance before his 
deed at his unconscious victim — the head groom and his com- 
rade went out and closed the door of the loose-box and passed 
into the hot, lowering summer night. 

Forest King, left in solitude, shook himself with a neigh; 


AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER. 


97 


took a refreshing roll in the straw, and turned with an appe- 
tite to his neglected gruel. Unhappily for himself, his fine 
instincts could not teach him the conspiracy that lay in wait 
for him and his ; and the gallant beast, content to be alone, soon 
slept the sleep of the righteous. 




CHAPTEE Yin. 


A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE. 

“ Seraph — I’ve been thinking,” said Cecil musingly, as they 
paced homeward together from the Scrubs, with the long line of 
the First Life stretching before and behind their chargers, and 
the bands of the Household Cavalry playing mellowly in their 
rear. 

“You don’t mean it. Never let it ooze out, Beauty; you’ll 
ruin your reputation ! ” 

Cecil laughed a little, very languidly; to have been in the 
sun for four hours, in full harness, had almost taken out of 
him any power to be amused at anything. 

“ I’ve been thinking,” he went on undisturbed, pulling down 
his chin-scale. “ What’s a fellow to do when he’s smashed ? ” 

“ Eh ? ” The Seraph couldn’t offer a suggestion ; he had a 
vague idea that men who were smashed never did do anything 
except accept the smashing; unless, indeed, they turned up 
afterward as touts, of which he had an equally vague suspicion. 

“ What do they do ? ” pursued Bertie. 

“ Go to the bad,” finally suggested the Seraph, lighting a 
great cigar, without heeding the presence of the Duke, a Field- 
Marshal, and a Serene Highness far on in front. 

Cecil shook his head. 

“ Can’t go where they are already. I’ve been thinking what 
a fellow might do that was up a tree; and on my honor there 
are lots of things one might turn to ” 

“Well, I suppose there are,” assented the Seraph, with a 
shake of his superb limbs in his saddle till his cuirass and chains 
and scabbard rang again. “ I should try the P. K., only they 
will have you train.” 

“One might do better than the P. E. Getting yourself into 
prime condition, only to be pounded out of condition and into 
a jelly, seems hardly logical or satisfactory — specially to your 
looking-glass, though, of course, it’s a matter of taste. But now, 
if I had a cropper, and got sold up ” 


98 


A STAG HUNT AU CLAIE DE LA LUNE. 


99 


“You, Beauty?” The Seraph puffed a giant puff of amaze- 
ment from his Havana, opening his blue eyes to their widest. 

“ Possible ! ” returned Bertie serenely, with a nonchalant 
twist to his mustaches. “ Anything’s possible. If I do now, it 
strikes me there are vast fields open.” 

“ Gold fields ? ” suggested the Seraph, wholly bewildered. 

“ Gold fields ? No ! I mean a field for — what d’ye call it — 
genius. Now, look here; nine-tenths of creatures in this world 
don’t know how to put on a glove. It’s an art, and an art that 
requires long study. If a few of us were to turn glove-fitters 
when we are fairly crushed, we might civilize the whole world, 
and prevent the deformity of an ill-fitting glove ever blotting 
creation and prostituting Houbigant. What do you say ? ” 

“ Don’t be such h donkey, Beauty ! ” laughed the Seraph, while 
his charger threatened to passage into an oyster cart. 

“You don’t appreciate the majesty of great plans,” rejoined 
Beauty reprovingly. “ There’s an immense deal in what I’m 
saying. Think what we might do for society — think how we 
might extinguish snobbery, if we just dedicated our smash to 
Mankind. We might open a College, where the traders might 
go through a course of polite training before they blossomed out 
as millionaires; the world would be spared an agony of dropped 
h’s and bad bows. We might have a Bureau where we regis- 
tered all our social experiences, and gave the Plutocracy a map 
of Belgravia, with all the pitfalls marked; all the inaccessible 
heights colored red, and all the hard-up great people dotted with 
gold to show the amount they’d be bought for — with directions 
to the ignoramuses whom to know, court, and avoid. We might 
form a Courier Company, and take Brummagem abroad under 
our guidance, so that the Continent shouldn’t think English- 
women always wear blue veils and gray shawls, and hear every 
Englishman shout for porter and beefsteak in Tortoni’s. We 
might teach them to take their hats off to women, and not to 
prod pictures with sticks, and to look at statues without poking 
them with an umbrella, and to be persuaded that all foreigners 
don’t want to be bawled at, and won’t understand bad French 
any the better for its being shouted. Or we might have a Joint- 
Stock Toilette Association, for the purposes of national art, and 
receive Brummagem to show it how to dress ; we might even 
succeed in making the feminine British Public drape itself 
properly, and the B. P. masculine wear boots that won’t creak, 
and coats that don’t wrinkle, and take off its hat without a jerk, 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


as though it were a wooden puppet hung on very stiff strings, 
) Or one might ” 

“Talk the greatest nonsense under the sun!” laughed the 
Seraph. “For mercy’s sake, are you mad, Bertie?” 

“ Inevitable question addressed to Genius ! ” yawned Cecil. 
“ I’m showing you plans that might teach a whole nation good 
style if we just threw ourselves into it a little. I don’t mean 
you, because you’ll never smash, and one don’t turn bear-leader, 
even to the B. P., without the primary impulse of being 
hard-up. And I don’t talk for myself, because, when I go to 
the dogs I have my own project.” 

“And what’s that?” 

“ To be groom of the chambers at Meuriee’s or Claridge’s,” 
responded Bertie solemnly. “ Those sublime creatures with 
their silver chains round their necks and their ineffable su- 
premacy over every other mortal ! — one would feel in a superior 
region still. And when a snob came to poison the air, how ex- 
quisitely one could annihilate him with showing him his igno- 
rance of claret; and when an epicure dined, how delightfully, 
as one carried in a turbot, one could test him with the eprou- 
vette positive, or crush him by the eprouvette negative. We 
have been Equerries at the Palace, both of us, but I don’t think 
we know what true dignity is till we shall have risen to head- 
waiters at a Grand Hotel.” 

With which Bertie let his charger pace onward, while he 
reflected thoughtfully on his future state. The Seraph laughed 
till he almost swayed out of saddle, but he shook himself into 
his balance again with another clash of his brilliant harness, 
while his eyes lightened and glanced with a fiery gleam down 
the line of the Household Cavalry. 

“ Well, if I went to the dogs I wouldn’t go to Grand Hotels; 
but I’ll tell you where I would go, Beauty.” 

“Where’s that?” 

“ Into hot service, somewhere. By Jove, I’d see some good 
fighting under another flag — out in Algeria, there, or with the 
Poles, or after Garibaldi. I would, in a day — I’m not sure I 
won’t now, and I bet you ten to one the life would be better 
than this.” 

Which was ungrateful in the Seraph, for his happy temper 
made him the sunniest and most contented of men, with no cross 
in his life save the dread that somebody would manage to marry 
him some day. But Bock had the true dash and true steel of 


A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE. 101 

tlie soldier in him, and his blue eyes flashed over liis Guards 
as he spoke, with a longing wish that he were leading them 
on to a charge instead of pacing with them toward Hyde Park. 

Cecil turned in his saddle and looked at him with a certain 
wonder and pleasure in his glance, and did not answer aloud. 
“ The deuce — that’s not a bad idea,”lie thought to himself; and 
the idea took root and grew with him. 

Far down, very far down, so far that nobody had ever seen 
it, nor himself ever expected it, there was a lurking instinct in 
“ Beauty,” — the instinct that had prompted him. when he sent 
the King at the Grand Military cracker, with that prayer, “ Kill 
me if you like, but don’t fail me ! ” — which, out of the languor 
and pleasure-loving temper of his unruffled life, had a vague, 
restless impulse toward the fiery perils and nervous excitement 
of a sterner and more stirring career. 

It was only vague, for he was naturally very indolent, very 
gentle, very addicted to taking all things passively, and very 
strongly of persuasion that to rouse yourself for anything was 
a niaiserie of the strongest possible folly; but it was there. It 
always is there with men of Bertie’s order, and only comes to 
light when the match of danger is applied to the touchhole. 
Then, though “ the Tenth don’t dance,” perhaps, with graceful, 
indolent, dandy insolence, they can fight as no others fight when 
Boot and Saddle rings through the morning air, and the slash- 
ing charge sweeps 'down with lightning speed and falcon swoop. 

“ In the case of a Countess, sir, the imagination is more 
excited,” says Dr. Johnson, who had, I suppose, little oppor- 
tunity of putting that doctrine for amatory intrigues to the 
test in. actual practice. Bertie, who had many opportunities, 
differed with him. He found love-making in his own polished, 
tranquil circles apt to become a little dull, and was more amused 
by Laura Lelas. However, he was sworn to the service of the 
Guenevere, and he drove his mail-phaeton down that day to 
another sort of Richmond dinner, of which the lady was the 
object instead of the Zu-Zu. 

She enjoyed thinking herself the wife of a jealous and in- 
exorable lord, and arranged her flirtations to evade him with a 
degree of skill so great that it was lamentable it should be 
thrown away on an agricultural husband, who never dreamt 
that the “ Fidelio— III— TstnegeR,” which met his eyes in the 
innocent face of his “Times” referred to an appointment at 
a Regent Street modiste’s, or that the advertisement—;' White 


102 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


wins — Twelve,” meant that if she wore white camellias in her 
hair at the opera she would give “ Beauty ” a meeting after it. 

Lady Guenevere was very scrupulous never to violate con- 
ventionalities. And yet she was a little fast — very fast, indeed, 
and was a queen of one of the fastest sets; but then — O sacred 
shield of a wife’s virtue — she could not have borne to lose her 
very admirable position, her very magnificent jointure, and, 
above all, the superb Guenevere diamonds ! 

I don’t know anything that will secure a husband from an 
infidelity so well as very fine family jewels, when such an in- 
delity would deprive his wife of them forever. Many women 
will leave their homes, their lords, their children, and their 
good name, if the fancy take them; but there is not one in 
a million who vill so far forget herself as to sever from pure 
rose-diamonds. 

So, *or the sake of the diamonds, she and Bertie had their 
rendezvous under the rose. 

This day she went down to see a dowager Baroness aunt, out 
at Hampton Court — really went, she was never so imprudent as 
to falsify her word ; and with the Dowager, who was very deaf 
and purblind, dined at Richmond, while the world thought her 
dining at Hampton Court. It was nothing to anyone, since 
none knew it to gossip about, that Cecil joined her there; that 
over the Star and Garter repast they arranged their meeting at 
Baden next month; that while the Baroness dozed over the 
grapes and peaches — she had been a beauty herself, in her own 
day, and still had her sympathies — they went on the river, in 
the little toy that he kept there for his fair friends’ use; float- 
ing slowly along irl the coolness of evening, while the stars 
loomed out in the golden trail of the sunset, and doing a grace- 
ful scene a la Musset and Meredith, with a certain languid 
amusement in the assumption of those poetic guises, for they 
were of the world worldly; and neither believed very much in 
the other. 

When you have just dined well, and there has been no fault 
in the clarets, and the scene is pretty, if it be not the Nile in 
the afterglow, the Arno in the moonlight, or the Loire in 
vintage-time, but only the Thames above Richmond, it is the 
easiest thing in the world to feel a touch of sentiment when 
you have a beautiful woman beside you who expects you to feel 
it. The evening was very hot and soft. There was a low south 
wind, the, water made a pleasant murmur, wending among its 


A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE. 103 


sedges. She was very lovely, moreover; lying back there among 
her laces and Indian shawls, with the sunset in the brown depths 
of her eyes and on her delicate cheek. And Bertie, as he looked 
on his liege lady, really had a glow of the old, real, foolish, for- 
gotten feeling stir at his heart, as he gazed on her in the half- 
light, and thought, almost wistfully, “ If the Jews were down 
on me to-morrow, would she really care, I wonder ? ” 

Really care? Bertie knew his world and its women too well 
to deceive himself in his heart about the answer. Nevertheless, 
he asked the question. “Would you care much, chere belle?” 

“ Care what ? ” 

“ If I came to grief — went to the bad, you know ; dropped 
out of the world altogether.” 

She raised her splendid eyes in amaze, with a delicate shudder 
through all her laces. “ Bertie ! you would break my heart ! 
What can you dream of ? ” 

“ Oh, lots of us end so ! How is a man to end ? ” answered 
Bertie philosophically, while his thoughts still ran off in a 
speculative skepticism. “ Is there a heart to break ? ” 

Her ladyship looked at him and laughed. 

“ A Werther in the Guards! I don’t think the role will suit 
either you or your corps, Bertie; but if you do it, pray do it 
artistically. I remember, last year, driving through Asnieres, 
when they had found a young man in the Seine; he was very 
handsome, beautifully dressed, and he held fast in his clinched 
hand a lock of gold hair. Now, there was a man who knew 
how to die gracefully, and make his death an idyl ! ” 

“ Died for a woman ? — ah ! ” murmured Bertie, with the 
Brummel nonchalance of his order. “ I don’t think I should 
do that, even for you — not, at least, while I had a cigar 
left.” 

And then the boat drifted backward, while the stars grew 7 
brighter and the last reflection of the sun died out; and they 
planned to meet to-morrow, and talked of Baden, and sketched 
projects for the winter in Paris, and went in and sat by the 
window, taking their coffee, and feeling, in a half-vague pleas- 
ure, the heliotrope-scented air blowing softly in from the gar- 
den below, and the quiet of the starlit river in the summer even- 
ing, with a white sail gleaming here and there, or the gentle 
splash of an oar following on the swift trail of a steamer; the 
quiet, so still and so strange after the crowded rush of the Lon- 
don season. 


104 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ Would she really care? ” thought Cecil, once more. In that 
moment he could have wished to think she would. 

But heliotrope, stars, and a river, even though it had been 
tawny and classical Tiber instead of ill-used and inodorous 
Thames, were not things sufficiently in the way of either of 
them to detain them long. They had both seen the Babylonian 
sun set over the ruins of the Birs Nimrud, and had talked of 
Paris fashions while they did so ; they had both leaned over the 
terraces of Bellosguardo, while the moon was full on Giotto’s 
tower, and had discussed their dresses for the Veglione mas- 
querade. It was not their style to care for these matters; they 
were pretty, to be sure, but they had seen so many of them. 

The Dowager went home in her brougham; the Countess 
drove m his mail-phaeton — objectionable, as she might be seen, 
but less objectionable than letting her servants know he had 
met her at Richmond. Besides, she obviated danger by bidding 
him set her down at a little villa across the park, where dwelt 
a confidential protegee of hers, whom she patronized; a former 
Trench governess, married tolerably well, who had the Countess’ 
confidences, and kept them religiously for sake of so aristocratic 
a patron, and of innumerable reversions of Spanish point and 
shawls that had never been worn, and rings, of which her lavish 
ladyship had got tired. 

From here she would take her ex-governess’ little brougham, 
and get quietly back to her own house in Eaton Square, in due 
time for all the drums and crushes at which she must make 
her appearance. This was the sort of little device which really 
make them think themselves in love, and gave the salt to the 
whole affair. Moreover, there was this ground for it, that had 
her lord once roused from the straw-yards of his prize cattle, 
there was a certain stubborn, irrational, old-world prejudice of 
pride and temper in him that would have made him throw 
expediency to the winds, then and there, with a blind and brutal 
disregard to slander and to the fact that none would ever adorn 
his diamonds as she did. So that Cecil had not only her fair 
fame, but her still more valuable jewels in his keeping w T hen he 
started from the Star and Garter in the warmth of the bright 
summer’s evening. 

It was a lovely night; a night for lonely highland tarns, and 
southern shores by Baiss ; without a cloud to veil the brightness 
of the stars. A heavy dew pressed the odors from the grasses, 
and the deep glades of the avenues were pierced here and there 


A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR HE LA LUNE. 105 


with a broad beam of silvery moonlight, slanting through the 
massive boles of the trees, and falling white and serene across 
the turf. Through the park, with the gleam of the water ever 
and again shining through the branches of the foliage, Cecil 
started his horses; his groom he had sent away on reaching 
Richmond, for the same reason as the Countess had dismissed 
her barouche, and he wanted no servant, since, as soon as he had 
set down his liege lady at her protegee’s, he would drive straight 
back to Piccadilly. But he had not noticed what he noted now, 
that instead of one of his carriage-grays, who had fallen slightly 
lame, they had put into harness the young one, Maraschino, 
who matched admirably for size and color, but who, being really 
a hunter, though he had been broken to shafts as well, -was not 
the horse with which to risk driving a lady. 

However, Beauty was a perfect whip and had the pair per- 
fectly in hand, so that he thought no more of the change, as the 
grays dashed at a liberal half-speed through the park, with 
their harness flashing in the moonlight, and their scarlet ro- 
settes fluttering in the pleasant air. The eyes besides him, the 
Titian-like mouth, the rich, delicate cheek, these were, to be 
sure, rather against the coolness and science that such a five- 
year-old as Maraschino required; they were distracting even 
to Cecil, and he had not prudence enough to deny his sovereign 
lady when she put her hands on the ribbons. 

“ The beauties ! give them to me, Bertie. Dangerous ? How 
absurd you are; as if I could not drive anything? Do you 
remember my four roans at Longchamps ? ” 

She could, indeed, with justice, pique herself on her skill; 
she drove matchlessly, but as he resigned them to her, Maras- 
chino and his companion quickened their trot, and tossed their 
pretty thoroughbred heads, conscious of a less powerful hand 
on the reins. 

“ I shall let their pace out ; there is nobody to run over here,” 
said her ladyship. “ Ya-t’en done, mon beau monsieur.” 

Maraschino, as though hearing the flattering conjuration, 
swung off into a light, quick canter, and tossed his head .again ; 
he knew that, good whip though she was, he could jerk his 
mouth free in a second, if he wanted. Cecil laughed — prudence 
was at no time his virtue — and leaned back contentedly, to be 
driven at a slashing pace through the balmy summer’s night, 
while the ring of the hoofs rang merrily on the turf, and the 
boughs were tossed aside with a dewy fragrance. As they went, 


106 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


the moonlight was shed about their path in the full of the 
young night, and at the end of a vista of boughs, on a grassy 
knoll were some phantom forms — the same graceful shapes that 
stand out against the purple heather and the tawny gorse of 
Scottish moorlands, while the lean rifle-tube creeps up by 
stealth. In the clear starlight there stood the deer — a dozen of 
them, a clan of stags alone — with their antlers clashing like 
a clash of swords, and waving like swaying banners as they 
tossed their heads and listened.* 

In an instant the hunter pricked his ears, snuffed the air, and 
twitched with passionate impatience at his bit; another instant 
and he had got his head, and, launching into a sweeping gallop, 
rushed .down the glade. 

Cecil sprang forward from his lazy rest, and seized the rib- 
bons that in one instant had cut his companion’s gloves to 
stripes. 

“ Sit still,” he said calmly, but under his breath. “ He has 
been always ridden with the Buckhounds; he will race the deer 
as sure as we live ! ” 

Race the deer he did. 

Startled, and fresh for their favorite nightly wandering, the 
stags were off like the wind at the noise of alarm, and the 
horses tore after them; no skill, no strength, no science could 
avail to pull them in; they had taken their bits between their 
teeth, and the devil that was in Maraschino lent the contagion 
of sympathy to the young carriage mare, who had never gone 
at such a pace since she had been first put in her break. 

Neither Cecil’s hands nor any other force could stop them 
now; on they went, hunting as straight in line as though stag- 
hounds streamed in front of them, and no phaeton rocked and 
swayed in a dead and dragging weight behind them. In a mo- 
ment he gauged the closeness and the vastness of the peril; 
there was nothing for it but to trust to chance, to keep his 
grasp on the reins to the last, and to watch for the first sign 
of exhaustion. Long ere that should be given death might have 

* Let me here take leave to beg pardon of the gallant Highland stags for 
comparing them one instant with the shabby, miserable-looking wretches that 
travesty them in Richmond Park. After seeing these latter scrubby, meager 
apologies for deer, one wonders why something better cannot be turned loose 
thei*e. A hunting-mare I know well nevertheless flattered them thus by 
racing them through the park : when in harness herself, to her own great 
disgust. 


A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE. 107 

come to them both ; but there was a gay excitation in that head- 
long rush through the summer night; there was a champagne- 
draught of mirth and mischief in that dash through the starlit 
woodland ; there was a reckless, breathless pleasure in that neck- 
or-nothing moonlight chase! 

Yet danger was so near with every oscillation; the deer. were 
trooping in fast flight, now clear in the moonlight, now lost 
in the shadow, bounding with their lightning grace over sward 
and hillock, over briar and brushwood, at that speed which kills 
most living things that dare to race the “ Monarch of the 
Glens.” And the grays were in full pursuit; the hunting fire 
was in the fresh young horse; he saw the shadowy branches of 
the antlers toss before him, and he knew no better than to 
hunt down in their scenting line as hotly as though the field 
of the Queen’s or the Baron’s was after them. What cared he 
for the phaeton that rocked and reeled on his traces; he felt 
its weight no more than if it were a wicker-work toy, and, ex- 
tended like a greyhound, he swerved from the road, swept 
through the trees, and tore down across the grassland in the 
track of the herd. 

Through the great boles of the trunks, bronze and black in 
the shadows, across the hilly rises of the turf, through the 
brushwood pell-mell, and crash across the level stretches of the 
sward, they raced as though the hounds were streaming in 
front; swerved here, tossed there, carried in a whirlwind over 
the mounds, wheeled through the gloom of the woven branches, 
splashed with a hiss through the shallow rain-pools, shot swift 
as an arrow across the silver radiance of the broad moonlight, 
borne against the sweet south wind, and down the odors of the 
trampled grass, the carriage was hurled across the park in the 
wild starlight chase. It rocked, it swayed, it shook, at every 
yard, while it was carried on like a paper toy; as yet the mar- 
velous chances of accident had borne it clear of the destruction 
that threatened it at every step as the grays, in the height of 
their pace now, and powerless even te have arrested themselves, 
flew through the woodland, neither knowing what they did, nor 
heeding where they went; but racing down on the scent, not 
feeling the strain of the traces, and only maddened the more by 
the noise of the whirling wheels behind them. 

As Cecil leaned back, his hands clinched on the reins, his 
sinews stretched almost to bursting in their vain struggle to 
recover power over the loosened beasts, the hunting ze&t woke in 


108 


UNDEK TWO FLAGS. 


him too, even while his eyes glanced on his companion in fear 
and anxiety for her. 

“ Tally-ho ! hark forward ! As I live, it is glorious ! ” he 
cried, half unconsciously. “For God’s sake, sit still, Beatrice! 
I will save you.” 

Inconsistent as the words were, they were true to what he 
felt; alone, he would have flung himself delightedly into the 
madness of the chase; for her he dreaded with horror the 
eminence of their peril. 

On fled the deer, on swept the horses; faster in the gleam of 
the moonlight the antlered troop darted on through the gloam- 
ing ; faster tore the grays in the ecstasy of their freedom ; head- 
long and heedless they dashed through the thickness of leaves 
and the weaving of branches; neck to neck, straining to dis- 
tance each other, and held together by the gall of the harness. 
The broken boughs snapped, the earth flew up beneath their 
hoofs; their feet struck scarlet sparks of fire from the 
stones, the carriage was whirled, rocking and tottering, through 
the maze of tree-trunks, towering like pillars of black stone up 
against the steel-blue clearness of the sky. The strain was 
intense; the danger deadly. Suddenly, straight ahead, beyond 
the darkness of the foliage, gleamed a line of light; shimmer- 
ing, liquid, and glassy — here brown as gloom where the shadows 
fell on it, here light as life where the stars mirrored on it. That 
trembling line stretched right in their path. For the first time, 
from the blanched lips beside him a cry of terror rang. 

“ The river ! — oh, heaven ! — the river ! ” 

There it lay in the distance, the deep and yellow water, cold 
in the moon’s rays, with its farther bank but a dull gray line 
in the mists that rose from it, and its swamp a yawning grave, 
as the horses, blind in their delirium and racing against each 
other, bore down through all obstacles toward its brink. Death 
was rarely ever closer; one score yards more, one plunge, one 
crash down the declivity and against the rails, one swell of the 
noisome tide above their heads, and life would be closed and 
passed for both of them. For one breathless moment his eyes 
met hers — in that moment he loved her, in that moment their 
hearts beat with a truer, fonder impulse to each other than 
they had ever done. Before the presence of a threatening death 
life grows real, love grows precious, to the coldest and most 
careless. 

No aid could come; not a living soul was nigh; the solitude 


A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE. 109 


was as complete as though a western prairie stretched around 
them; there were only the still and shadowy night, the chilly 
silence, on which the beat of the plunging hoofs shattered like 
thunder, and the glisten of the flowing water growing nearer 
and nearer every yard. The tranquillity around only jarred 
more horribly on ear and brain; the vanishing forms of the 
antlered deer only gave a weirder grace to the moonlight chase 
whose goal was the grave. It was like the midnight hunt after 
Herne the Hunter; but here, behind them, hunted Death. 

The animals neither saw nor knew what waited them, as they 
rushed down on to the broad, gray stream, veiled from them by 
the slope and the screen of flickering leaves; to save them 
there was but one chance, and that so desperate that it looked 
like madness. It was but a second’s thought; he gave it but 
a second’s resolve. 

The next instant he stood on his feet, as the carriage swayed 
to and fro over the turf, balanced himself marvelously as it 
staggered in that furious gallop from side to side, clinched the 
reins hard in the grip of his teeth, measured the distance with 
an unerring eye, and, crouching his body for the spring with 
all the science of the old playing-fields of his Eton days, cleared 
the dashboard and lighted astride on the back of the hunting 
five-year-old — how, he could never have remembered or have 
told. 

The tremendous pace at which they went swayed him with 
a lurch and a reel over the off-side; a woman’s cry rang again, 
clear, and shrill, and agonized on the night; a moment more, 
and he would have fallen, head downward, beneath the horses’ 
feet. But he had ridden stirrupless and saddleless ere now; he 
recovered himself with the suppleness of an Arab, and firm- 
seated behind the collar, with one leg crushed between the pole 
and Maraschino’s flanks, gathering in the ribbons till they were 
tight-drawn as a bridle, he strained with all the might and 
sinew that were in him to get the grays in hand before they 
could plunge down into the water. His wrists were wrenched 
like pulleys, the resistance against him was hard as iron ; but as 
he had risked life and limb in the leap which had seated him 
across the harnessed loins of the now terrified beast, so he 
risked them afresh to get the mastery now; to slacken them, 
turn them ever so slightly, and save the woman he loved — loved, 
at least in this hour, as he had not loved her before. One mo- 
ment more, while the half -maddened beast rushed through the 


110 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


shadows; one moment more, till the river stretched full before 
them in all its length and breadth, without a living thing upon 
its surface to break the still and awful calm; one moment — and 
the force of cool command conquered and broke their wills 
despite themselves. The hunter knew his master’s voice, his 
touch, his pressure, and slackened speed by an irresistible, al- 
most unconscious habit of obedience ; the carriage mare, checked 
and galled in the full height of her speed, stood erect, pawing 
the air with her forelegs, and flinging the white froth over her 
withers, while she plunged blindly in her nervous terror; then 
with a crash, her feet came down upon the ground, the broken 
harness shivered together with a sharp, metallic clash ; snorting, 
panting, quivering, trembling, the pair stood passive and van- 
quished. 

The carriage was overthrown; but the high and fearless 
courage of the peeress bore her unharmed, even as she was 
flung out on to the yielding fern -grown turf. Fair as she was 
in every hour, she had never looked fairer than as he swung 
himself from the now powerless horses and threw himself beside 
her. 

“ My love — my love, you are saved ! ” 

The beautiful eyes looked up, half unconscious; the danger 
told on her now that it was passed, as it does most commonly 
with women. 

“ Saved ! — lost ! All the world must know, now, that you 
are with me this evening,” she murmured with a shudder. She 
lived for the world, and her first thought was of self. 

He soothed her tenderly. 

“Hush — be at rest! There is no injury but what I can re- 
pair, nor is there a creature in sight to have witnessed the 
accident. Trust in me; no one shall ever know of this. You 
shall reach town safely and alone.” 

And, while he promised, he forgot that he thus pledged his 
honor to leave four hours of his life so buried that, however 
much he needed, he neither should nor could account for them. 


CHAPTER IX. 


THE PAINTED BIT. 

Baden was at its brightest. The Victoria, the Badischer Hof, 
the Stephanie Bauer were crowded. The Kurliste had a daz- 
zling string of names. Imperial grandeur sauntered in slippers ; 
chiefs, used to be saluted with “ Ave Caesar Imperator,” smoked 
a papelito in peace over “ Galignani.” Emperors gave a good- 
day to ministers who made their thrones beds of thorns, and 
little kings elbowed great capitalists who could have bought 
them all up in a morning’s work in the money market. State- 
craft was in its slippers and diplomacy in its dressing-gown. 
Statesmen who had just been outwitting each other at the 
hazard of European politics laughed good-humoredly as they 
laid their gold down on the color. Rivals who had lately been 
quarreling over the knotty points of national frontiers now only 
vied for a twenty-franc rosebud from the bouquetiere. Knights 
of the Garter and Knights of the Golden Fleece, who had hated 
each other to deadliest rancor with the length of the Continent 
between them, got friends over a mutually good book on the 
Rastadt or Foret Koir. Brains that were the powder depot of 
one-half of the universe let themselves be lulled with the mono- 
tone of “Faites votre jeu!” or fanned to tranquil amusement 
by a fair idiot’s coquetry. And lips that, with a whisper, could 
loosen the coursing slips of the wild hell-dogs of war, murmured 
love to a princess, led the laugh at a supper at five in the morn- 
ing, or smiled over their own caricatures done by Tenniel or 
Cham. 

Baden was full. The supreme empires of demi-monde sent 
their sovereigns, diamond-crowned and resistless, to outshine all 
other principalities and powers, while in breadth of marvelous 
skirts, in costliness of cobweb laces, in unaproachability of In- 
dian shawls and gold embroideries, and mad fantasies and 
Cleopatra extravagances, and jewels fit for a Maharajah, the 
Zu-Zu was distanced by none. 

Among the kings and heroes and celebrities who gathered 

ill 


112 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


under the pleasant shadow of the pine-crowned hills, there was 
not one in his way greater than the steeple-chaser, Forest King 
— certes, there was not one half so honest. 

The Guards’ Crack was entered for the Prix de Dames, the 
sole representative of England. There were two or three good 
things out of French stables, — specially a killing little bay, 
L’Etoile, — and there was an Irish sorrel, the property of an Aus- 
trian of rank, of which fair things were whispered; but it was 
scarcely possible that anything could stand against the King 
and that wonderful stride of his which spread-eagled his field 
like magic, and his countrymen were well content to leave their 
honor and their old renown to “ Beauty ” and his six-year- 
old. 

Beauty himself, with a characteristic philosophy, had a sort 
of conviction that the German race would set everything 
square. He stood either to make a very good thing on it or 
to be very heavily bit. There could be no medium. He never 
hedged in his life; and as it was almost a practical impossi- 
bility that anything the foreign stables could get together 
would even be able to land within half a dozen lengths of the 
King, Cecil, always willing to console himself, and invariably 
too careless to take the chance of adverse accident into ac- 
count, had come to Baden, and was amusing himself there 
dropping a Friedrich d’Or on the rouge, flirting in the shady 
alleys of the Lichtenthal, waltzing Lady Guenevere down the 
ballroom, playing ecarte with some Serene Highness, supping 
with the Zu-Zu and her set, and occupying rooms that a Rus- 
sian Prince had had before him, with all the serenity of a 
millionaire, as far as memory of money went; with much more 
than the serenity in other matters of most millionaires, who, 
finding themselves uncommonly ill at ease in the pot-pourri of 
monarchs and ministers, of beau-monde and demi-monde, would 
have given half their newly turned thousands to get rid of the 
odor of Capel Court and the Bourse, and to attain the calm, 
negligent assurance, the easy, tranquil insolence, the non- 
chalance with Princes, and the supremacy aifiong the Free 
Lances, which they saw and coveted in the indolent Guardsman. 

Bertie amused himself. He might be within a day of his 
ruin, but that was no reason why he should not sip his iced, 
sherbet and laugh with a pretty French actress to-night. His 
epicurean formulary was the same as old Herrick’s, and he 
would have paraphrased this poet’s famous quatrain into 


THE PAINTED BIT. 


113 


Drink a pure claret while you may, 

Your “ stiff ” is still a-flying; 

And he who dines so well to-day 
To-morrow may be lying, 

Pounced down upon by Jews tout net , 

Or outlawed in a French guinguette ! 

Bertie was a great believer — if the words are not too sono- 
rous and too earnest to be applied to his very inconsequent views 
upon any and everything — in the philosophy of happy accident. 
Far as it was in him to have a conviction at all, — which was 
a thorough-going, serious sort of thing not by any means his 
“ form,” — he had a conviction that the doctrine of “ Eat, drink, 
and enjoy, for to-morrow we die ” was a universal panacea. 
He was reckless to the uttermost stretch of recklessness, all 
serene and quiet . though his pococurantism and his daily man- 
ner were; and while subdued to the undeviating monotone and 
languor of his peculiar set in all his temper and habits, the 
natural dare-devil in him took out its inborn instincts in a 
wildly careless and gamester-like imprudence with that most 
touchy tempered and inconsistent of all coquettes — Fortune. 

Things, he thought, could not well be worse with him than 
they were now. So he piled all on one coup, and stood to be 
sunk or saved by the Prix de Dames. Meanwhile, all the same, 
he murmured Mussetism to the Guenevere under the ruins of 
the Alte Schloss, lost or won a rouleau at the roulette-wheel, 
gave a banknote to the famous Isabel for a tea-rose, drove the 
Zu-Zu four in hand to see the Flat races, took his guinea 
tickets for the Concerts, dined with Princes, lounged arm-in- 
arm with Grand Dukes, gave an Emperor a hint as to the best 
cigars, and charmed a Monarch by unfolding the secret of the 
aroma of a Guards’ Punch, sacred to the Household. 

“ Si on ne meurt pas de desespoir ou finit par manger des 
huitres,” said the witty Frenchwoman. Bertie, who believed in 
bivalves but not in heroics, thought it best to take the oysters 
first and eschew the despair entirely. 

He had one unchangeable quality — insouciance; and he had, 
moreover, one unchangeable faith — the King. Lady Guenevere 
had reached home unnoticed after the accident of their moon- 
light stag-hunt. His brother, meeting him a day or two after 
their interview, had nodded affirmatively, though sulkily, in 
answer to his inquiries, and had murmured that it was “ all 
square now.” The Jews and the tradesmen had let him leave 


114 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


for Baden without more serious measures than a menace, more 
or less insolently worded. In the same fashion he trusted that 
the King’s running at the Bad, with the moneys he had on it, 
would set all things right for a little while ; when, if his family 
interest, which was great, would get him his step in the First 
Life, he thought, desperate as things were, they might come 
round again smoothly, without a notorious crash. 

“You are sure the King will ‘stay,’ Bertie?” asked Lady 
Guenevere, who had some hundreds in gloves (and even under 
the rose “ sported a pony ” or so more seriously) on the event. 

“ Certain ! But if he don’t, I promise you as pretty a tableau 
as your Asnieres one; for your sake, I’ll make the finish as 
picturesque as possible. Wouldn’t it be well to give me a lock 
of hair in readiness ? ” 

Her ladyship laughed and shook her head; if a man killed 
himself, she did not desire that her gracious name should be 
entangled with the folly. 

“No; I don’t do those things,” she said, with captivating 
waywardness. “ Besides, though the Oos looks cool and pleas- 
ant, I greatly doubt that under any pressure you would trouble 
it; suicides are too pronounced for your style, Bertie.” 

“ At all events, a little morphia in one’s own rooms would 
be quieter, and better taste,” said Cecil, while he caught him- 
self listlessly wondering, as he had wondered at Richmond, if 
this badinage were to turn into serious fact — how much would 
she care. 

“ May your sins be forgiven you ! ” cried Chesterfield, the 
apostle of training, as he and the Seraph came up to the table 
where Cecil and Cos Wentworth were breakfasting in the gar- 
den of the Stephanien on the race-day itself. “ Liqueurs, truf- 
fles, and every devilment under the sun? — cold beef, and noth- 
ing to drink, Beauty, if ydu’ve any conscience left ! ” 

“ Never had a grain, dear boy, since I can remember,” mur*- 
mured Bertie apologetically. “ You took all the rawness off me 
at Eton.” 

“ And you’ve been taking coffee in bed, I’ll swear ? ” pursued 
the cross-examiner. 

“What if he have? Beauty’s condition can’t be upset by a 
little mocha, nor mine either,” said his universal defender; and 
the Seraph shook his splendid limbs with a very pardonable 
vanity. 


THE PAINTED BIT. 


115 


“ Ruteroth trains ; Ruteroth trains awfully,” put in Cos 
Wentworth, looking up out of a great silver flagon of Bad- 
minton, with which he was ending his breakfast; and referring 
to the Austrian who was to ride the Paris favorite. “ Remem- 
ber him at La Marche last year, and the racing at Vincennes — 
didn’t take a thing that could make flesh — muscles like iron, 
you know — never touched a soda even ” 

“ I’ve trained, too,” said Bertie submissively ; “ look how I’ve 
been waltzing! There isn’t harder work than that for any fel- 
low. A deuxtemps with the Duchess takes it out of you like 
any spin over the flat.” 

His censurers laughed, but did not give in their point. 

“You’ve run shocking risks, Beauty,” said Chesterfield; 
“ the King’s in fine running-form ; don’t say he isn’t ; but you’ve 
said scores of times what a deal of riding he takes. How, can 
you tell us yourself that you’re in as hard condition as you were 
when you won the Military, eh ? ” 

Cecil shook his head with a sigh. 

“ I don’t think I am ; I’ve had things to try me, you see. 
There was that Verschoyle’s proposal. I did absolutely think 
at one time she’d marry me before I could protest against it! 
Then there was that shock to one’s whole nervous system, when 
that indigo man, who took Lady Laura’s house, asked us to 
dinner, and actually thought we should go! — and there was a 
scene, you know, of all earthly horrors, when Mrs. Gervase was 
so near eloping with me, and Gervase cut up rough, instead of 
pitying me; and then the field-days were so many, and so late 
into the season; and I exhausted myself so at the Belvoir the- 
atricals at Easter ; and I toiled so atrociously playing ‘ Al- 
maviva ’ at your place, Seraph — a private opera’s galley slave’s 
work ! — and, altogether, I’ve had a good many things to pull me 
down since the winter,” concluded Bertie, with a plaintive self- 
condolence over his truffles. 

The rest of his condemning judges laughed, and passed the 
plea of sympathy; the Coldstreamer alone remained censorious 
and untouched. 

“ Pull you down ! You’ll never pull off the race if you sit 
drinking liqueurs all the morning!” growled that censor. 
“ Look at that ! ” 

Bertie glanced at the London telegram tossed across to him, 
sent from a private and confidential agent. 

“ Betting here — two to one on L’Etoile ; Irish Roan offered 


116 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


and taken freely. Slight decline in closing prices for the King ; 
getting on French bay rather heavily at midnight. Fancy 
there’s a commission out against the King. Looks suspicious.” 
Cecil shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows a little. 

“ All the better for us. Take all they’ll lay against me. It’s 
as good as our having a i Commission out ’ ; and if any cads get 
one against us it can’t mean mischief, as it would with pro- 
fessional jocks.” 

“ Are you so sure of yourself, Beauty ? ” 

Beauty shook his head repudiatingly. 

“ Never am sure of anything, much less of myself. I’m a 
chameleon, a perfect chameleon ! ” 

“ Are you so sure of the King, then ? ” 

“ My dear fellow, no ! I ask you in reason, how can I be 
sure of what isn’t proved? I’m like that country fellow the old 
story tells of; he believed in fifteen shillings because he’d once 
had it in his hand ; others, he’d heard, believed in a pound ; but, 
for his part, he didn’t, because he’d never seen it. Now that 
was a man who’d never commit himself; he might have had 
the Exchequer! I’m the same; I believe the King can win at 
a good many things because I’ve seen him do ’em; but I can’t 
possibly tell whether he can get this, because I’ve never ridden 
him for it. I shall be able to tell you at three o’clock — but 
that you don’t care for ” 

And Bertie, exhausted with making such a lengthened ex- 
position — the speeches he preferred were monosyllabic — com- 
pleted his sins against training with a long draught of claret- 
cup. 

“ Then what the devil do you mean by telling us to pile our 
pots on you?” asked the outraged Coldstreamer, with natural 
wrath. 

“Faith is a beautiful sight!” said Bertie, with solemnity. 
“ If I’m bowled over, you’ll be none the less sublime instances 
of heroic devotion ” 

“Offered on the altar of the Jews!” laughed the Seraph, 
as he turned him away from the breakfast table by the shoulders. 
“ Thanks, Beauty ; I’ve 1 four figures ’ on you, and you’ll be good 
enough to win them for me. Let’s have a look at the King. 
They are just going to walk him over.” 

Cecil complied; while he lounged away with the others to 
the stables, with a face of the most calm, gentle, weary indiffer- 
ence in the world, the thought crossed him for a second of how 


THE PAINTED BIT. 


117 


very near he was to the wind. The figures in his betting-book 
were to the tune of several thousands, one way or another. If 
he won this morning it would be all right, of course ; if he lost — 
even Beauty, odd mixture of devil-may-care and languor though 
he was, felt his lips grow, for the moment, hot and cold by turns 
as he thought of that possible contingency. 

The King looked in splendid condition ; he knew well enough 
what was up again, knew what was meant by that extra sedu- 
lous dressing-down, that setting muzzle that had been buckled 
on him some nights previous, the limitation put to his drink, 
the careful trial spins in the gray of the mornings, the con- 
clusive examination of his plates by a skillful hand; he knew 
what was required of him, and a horse in nobler condition never 
stepped out in body clothing, as he was ridden slowly down on to 
the plains of Iffesheim. The Austrian Dragoon, a Count and 
a Chamberlain likewise, who was to ride his only possible rival, 
the French horse L’Etoile, pulled his tawny silken mustaches 
as he saw the great English hero come up the course, and 
muttered to himself, “ L’affaire est finie.” L’fitoile was a bril- 
liant enough bay in his fashion, but Count Ruteroth knew the 
measure of his pace and powers too thoroughly to expect him 
to live against the strides of the Guards’ gray. 

“ My beauty, won’t you cut those German fellows down ! ” 
muttered Rake, the enthusiast, in the saddling inclosure. “ As 
for those fools what go agin you, you’ll put them in a hole, and 
no mistake. French horse, indeed! Why, you’ll spread-eagle 
all them Mossoos’ and Meinherrs’ cattle in a brace of sec- 
onds ” 

Rake’s foe, the head groom, caught him up savagely. 

“ Won’t you never learn decent breedin’? When we wins 
we wins on the quiet, and when we loses we loses as if we liked 
it; all that brayin’, and flauntin’, and boastin’ is only fit for 
cads. The ’oss is in tip-top condition; let him show what he 
can do over furren ground.” 

“ Lucky for him, then, that he hasn’t got you across the pig- 
skin ; you’d rope him, I believe, as soon as look at him, if it was 
made worth your while,” retorted Rake, in caustic wrath; his 
science of repartee chiefly lay in a successful “plant,” and he 
was here uncomfortably conscious that his opponent was in 
the right of the argument, as he started through the throng to 
put his master into the “ shell ” of the Shire-famous scarlet and 
white. 


118 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ Tip-top condition, my boy — tip-top, and no mistake,” mur- 
mured Mr. Willon, for the edification of those around them as 
the saddle-girths were buckled on, and the Guards’ Crack stood 
the cynosure of every eye at Iffesheim. 

Then, in his capacity as head attendant on the hero, he di- 
rected the exercise bridle to be taken off, and with his own hands 
adjusted a new and handsome one, slung across his arm. 

“ ’Tis a’most a pity. ’Tis a’most a pity,” thought the worthy, 
as he put the curb on the King ; “ but I shouldn’t have been 
haggravated with that hinsolent soldiering chap. There, my 
boy! if you’ll win with a painted quid, I’m a Dutchman.” 

Forest King champed his bit between his teeth a little; it 
tasted bitter; he tossed his head and licked it with his tongue 
impatiently; the taste had got down his throat and he did not 
like its flavor; he turned his deep, lustrous eyes with a gentle 
patience on the crowd about him, as though asking them what 
was the matter with him. No one moved his bit; the only per- 
son who could have had such authority was busily giving the 
last polish to his coat with a fine handkerchief — that glossy 
neck which had been so dusted many a time with the cobweb 
coronet-broidered handkerchiefs of great ladies — and his in- 
stincts, glorious as they were, were not wise enough to tell him 
to kick his head groom down, then and there, with one mortal 
blow, as his poisoner and betrayer. 

The King chafed under the taste of that “ painted quid ” ; 
he felt a nausea as he swallowed, and he turned his handsome 
head with a strange, pathetic astonishment in his glance. At 
that moment a familiar hand stroked his mane, a familiar foot 
was put into his stirrup, Bertie threw himself into saddle; the 
lightest w T eight that ever gentleman-rider rode, despite his six- 
foot length of limb. The King, at the well-known touch, the 
well-loved voice, pricked his delicate ears, quivered in all his 
frame with eager excitation, snuffed the air restlessly through 
his distended nostrils, and felt every vein under his satin skin 
thrill and swell with pleasure; he was all impatience, all power, 
all longing, vivid intensity of life. If only that nausea would 
go ! He felt a restless sickliness stealing on him that his young 
and gallant strength had never known since he was foaled. But 
it was not in the King to yield to a little ; he flung his head up, 
champing angrily at the bit, then walked down to the starting- 
post with his old calm, collected grace; and Cecil, looking at 
the glossy bow of the neck, and feeling the width of the mag- 


THE PAINTED BIT. 119 

nificent ribs beneath him, stooped from his saddle a second as 
he rode out of the inclosure and bent to the Seraph. 

“ Look at him, Rock ! the thing’s as good as won.” 

The day was very warm and brilliant; all Baden had come 
down to the race-course; continuous strings of carriages, with 
their four or six horses and postilions, held the line far down 
over the plains; mob there was none, save of women in match- 
less toilets, and men with the highest names in the “ Almanac 
de Gotha ” ; the sun shone cloudlessly on the broad, green 
plateau of Iffesheim, on the white amphitheater of chalk hills, 
ond on the glittering, silken folds of the flags of England, 
Prance, Prussia, and of the Grand Duchy itself, that floated 
from the summits of the Grand Stand, Pavilion, and Jockey 
Club. 

The ladies, descending from the carriages, swept up and 
down on the green course that was so free from “ cads ” and 
“ legs ” ; their magnificent skirts trailing along without the risk 
of a grain of dust ; their costly laces side by side with the Aus- 
trian uniforms of the military men from Rastadt. The betting 
was but slight ; the Paris formulas, “ Combien contre l’Etoile ? ” 
“ Six cents francs sur le cheval Anglais ? ” echoing everywhere 
in odd contrast with the hubbub and striking clamor of Eng- 
lish betting rings ; the only approach to anything like “ real 
business ” being transacted between the members of the House- 
hold and those of the Jockey Clubs. Iffesheim was pure pleas- 
ure, like every other item of Baden existence, and all aristo- 
cratic, sparkling, rich, amusement-seeking Europe seemed 
gathered there under the sunny skies, and on everyone’s lips in 
the titled throng was but one name — Forest King’s. Even the 
coquettish bouquet-sellers, who remembered the dresses of his 
own colors which Cecil had given them, last year when he had 
won the Rastadt, would sell nothing except little twin scarlet 
and white moss rosebuds ; of which thousands were gathered and 
died that morning in honor of the English Guards’ champion. 

A slender event usually, the presence of the renowned crack 
of the Household Cavalry made the Prix de Dames the most 
eagerly watched-for entry on the card ; and the rest of the field 
were scarcely noticed as the well-known gold-embroidered 
jacket came up at the starting-post. 

The King saw that blaze of light and color over course and 
stands that he knew so well by this time; he felt the pressure 
round him of his foreign rivals as they reared and pulled and 


120 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


fretted and passaged; the old longing quivered in all his eager 
limbs, the old fire wakened in all his dauntless blood; like the 
charger at sound of the trumpet-call, he lived in his past vic- 
tories, and was athirst for more. But yet — between him and 
the sunny morning there seemed a dim, hazy screen; on his 
delicate ear the familiar clangor smote with something dulled 
and strange ; there seemed a numbness stealing down his frame ; 
he shook his head in an unusual and irritated impatience; he 
did not know what ailed him. The hand he loved so loyally 
told him the work that was wanted of him; but he felt its 
guidance dully too, and the dry, hard, hot earth, as he struck 
it with his hoof, seemed to sway and heave beneath him; the 
opiate had stolen into his veins and was creeping stealthily 
and surely to the sagacious brain, and over the clear, bright 
senses. 

The signal for the start was given; the first mad headlong 
rush broke away with the force of a pent-up torrent suddenly 
loosened; every instinct of race and custom, and of that obedi- 
ence which rendered him flexible as silk to his rider’s will, sent 
him forward with that stride which made the Guards’ Crack 
a household word in all the Shires. For a moment he shook 
himself clear of all his horses, and led off in the old grand 
sweeping canter before the French bay three lengths in the 
one single effort. 

Then into his eyes a terrible look of anguish came ; the numb 
and sickly nausea was upon him, his legs trembled, before his 
sight was a blurred, whirling mist; all the strength and force 
and mighty life within him felt ebbing out, yet he struggled 
bravely. He strained, he panted, he heard the thundering thud 
of the first flight gaining nearer and nearer upon him; he felt 
his rivals closing hotter and harder in on him; he felt the 
steam of his opponent’s smoking, foam-dashed withers burn 
on his own flanks and shoulders ; he felt the maddening pressure 
of a neck-to-neck struggle ; he felt what in all his victorious life 
he had never known — the paralysis of defeat. 

The glittering throngs spreading over the plains gazed at him 
in the sheer stupor of amazement; they saw that the famous 
English hero was dead-beat as any used-up knacker. 

One second more he strove to wrench himself through the 
throng of his horses, through the headlong crushing press, 
through — worst foe of all! — the misty darkness curtaining his 
sight ! one second more he tried to wrestle back the old life into 


THE PAINTED BIT. 


121 


his limbs, the unworn power and freshness into nerve and 
sinew. Then the darkness fell utterly ; the mighty heart failed ; 
he could do no more — and his rider’s hand slackened and turned 
him gently backward; his rider’s voice sounded very low and 
quiet to those who, seeing that every effort was hopeless, surged 
and clustered rdund his saddle. 

“ Something ails the King,” said Cecil calmly ; “ he is fairly 
knocked off his legs. Some Vet must look to him; ridden a 
yard farther he will fall.” 

Words so gently spoken!- 4 — yet in the single minute that alone 
had passed since they had left the Starter’s Chair, a lifetime 
seemed to have been centered, alike to Forest King and to his 
owner. 

The field swept on with a rush, without the favorite; and the 
Prix de Dames was won by the French bay L’Etoile. 


CHAPTER X. 


“petite reine.” 

When a young Prussian had shot himself the night before for 
roulette losses, the event had not thrilled, startled, and im- 
pressed the gay Baden gathering one tithe so gravely and so 
enduringly as did now the unaccountable failure of the great 
Guards’ Crack. 

Men could make nothing of it save the fact that there was 
“ something dark ” somewhere. The “ painted quid ” had done 
its work more thoroughly than Willon and the welsher had 
intended; they had meant that the opiate should be just suffi- 
cient to make the favorite off his speed, but not to take effects 
so palpable as these. It was, however, so deftly prepared that 
under examination no trace could be found of it, and the re- 
sult of veterinary investigation, while it left unremoved the 
conviction that the horse had been doctored, could not explain 
when or how, or by what medicines. Forest King had simply 
“ broken down ” ; favorites do this on the flat and over the fur- 
row from an overstrain, from a railway journey, from a touch 
of cold, from a sudden decay of power, from spasm, or from 
vertigo; those who lose by them may think what they will of 
“ roping,” or “ painting,” or “ nobbling,” but what can they 
prove ? 

Even in the great scandals that come before the autocrats 
of the Jockey Club, where the tampering is clearly known, can 
the matter ever be really proved and sifted? Very rarely. The 
trainer affects stolid unconsciousness or unimpeachable re- 
spectability; the hapless stable-boy is cross-examined, to protest 
innocence and ignorance, and most likely protest them rightly; 
he is accused, dismissed, and ruined; or some young jock has 
a “ caution ” out everywhere against him, and never again can 
get a mount even for the commonest handicap; but, as a rule, 
the real criminals are never unearthed, and by consequence are 
never reached and punished. 

The Household, present and absent, were heavily hit. They 
cared little for the “ crushers ” they incurred, but their cham- 


PETITE REINE. 


123 


a 




pion’s failure, when he was in the face of Europe, cut them 
more terribly. The fame of the English riding-men had 
been trusted to Forest King and his owner, and they, who had 
never before betrayed the trust placed in them, had broken down 
like any screw out of a livery stable; like any jockey bribed to 
“ pull ” at a suburban selling-race. It was fearfully bitter work ; 
and, unanimous to a voice, the indignant murmur of “ doc- 
tored ” ran through the titled, fashionable crowds on the Baden 
course in deep and ominous anger. 

The Seraph’s grand wrath poured out fulminations against 
the wicked-doer whosoever he was, or wheresoever he lurked; 
and threatened, with a vengeance that would be no empty words, 
the direst chastisement of the “ Club,” of which both his father 
and himself were stewards, upon the unknown criminal. The 
Austrian and French nobles, while winners by the event, were 
scarce in less angered excitement. It seemed to cast the foulest 
slur upon their honor that, upon foreign ground, the renowned 
English steeple-chaser should have been tampered with thus; 
and the fair ladies of either world added the influence of their 
silver tongues, and were eloquent in the vivacity of their sym- 
pathy- and resentment with a unanimity women rarely show in 
savoring defeat, but usually reserve for the fairer opportunity 
of swaying the censer before success. 

Cecil alone,* amid it all, was very quiet ; he said scarcely a 
word, nor could the sharpest watcher have detected an altera- 
tion in his countenance. Only once, when they talked around 
him of the investigations of the Club, and of the institution of 
inquiries to discover the guilty traitor, he looked up with a 
sudden, dangerous lighting of his soft, dark, hazel eyes, under 
the womanish length of their lashes : “ When you find him, leave 
him to me.” 

The light was gone again in an instant; but those who 
knew the wild strain that ran in the Royallieu blood knew by 
it that, despite his gentle temper, a terrible reckoning for the 
evil done his horse might come some day from the Quietist. 

He said little or nothing else, and to the sympathy and in- 
dignation expressed for him on all sides he answered with his 
old, listless calm. But, in truth, he barely knew what was say- 
ing or doing about him; he felt like a man stunned and crushed 
with the violence of some tremendous fall; the excitation, the 
agitation, the angry amazement around him (growing as near 
clamor as was possible in those fashionable betting-circles, so 


124 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


free from roughs and almost free from bookmakers), the con- 
flicting opinions clashing here and there — even, indeed, the 
graceful condolence of the brilliant women — were insupportable 
to him. He longed to be out of this world which had so well 
amused him; he longed passionately, for the first time in his. 
life, to be alone. 

For he knew that with the failure of Forest King had gone 
the last plank that saved him from ruin; perhaps the last 
chance that stood between him and dishonor. He had never 
looked on it as within the possibilities of hazard that the horse 
could be defeated; now, little as those about him knew it, an 
absolute and irremediable disgrace fronted him. For, secure 
in the issue of the Prix de Dames, and compelled to weight his 
chances in it very heavily that his winnings might be wide 
enough to relieve some of the debt-pressure upon him, his losses 
now were great; and he knew no more how to raise the moneys 
to meet them than he would have known how to raise the dead. 

The blow fell with crashing force; the fiercer because his 
indolence had persisted in ignoring his danger, and because his 
whole character was so naturally careless and so habituated 
to ease and to enjoyment. 

A bitter, heartsick misery fell on him ; the tone of honor was 
high with him; he might be reckless of everything else, but 
he could never be reckless in what infringed, of went nigh to 
infringe, a very stringent code. Bertie never reasoned in that 
way; he simply followed the instincts of his breeding without 
analyzing them ; but these led him safely and surely right in all 
his dealings with his fellow-men, however open to censure his 
life might be in other matters. Careless as he was, and indif- 
ferent, to levity, in many things, his ideas of honor were really 
very pure and elevated; he suffered proportionately now that, 
through the follies of his own imprudence, and the baseness of 
some treachery he could neither sift nor avenge, he saw himself 
driven down into as close a jeopardy of disgrace as ever befell 
a man who did not willfully, and out of guilty coveting of its 
fruits, seek it. 

For the first time in his life the society of his troops of ac- 
quaintance became intolerably oppressive; for the first time 
in his life he sought refuge from thought in the stimulus of 
drink, and dashed down neat Cognac as though it were iced 
Badminton, as he drove with his set off the disastrous plains of 
Iffesheim. He shook himself free of them as soon as he could; 


“petite reine.” 125 

he felt the chatter round him insupportable ; the men were thor- 
oughly good-hearted, and though they were sharply hit by the 
day’s issue, never even by implication hinted at owing the dis- 
aster to their faith in him, but the very cordiality and sym- 
pathy they showed cut him the keenest — the very knowledge 
of their forbearance made his own thoughts darkest. 

Far worse to Cecil than the personal destruction the day’s 
calamity brought him was the knowledge of the entire faith 
these men had placed in him, and the losses which his own 
mistaken security had caused them. Granted he could neither 
guess nor avert the trickery which had brought about his fail- 
ure ; but none the less did he feel that he had failed them ; none 
the less did the very generosity and magnanimity they showed 
him sting him like a scourge. 

He got away from them at last, and wandered out alone into 
the gardens of the Stephanien, till the green trees of an alley 
shut him in in solitude, and the only echo of the gay world of 
Baden was the strain of a band, the light mirth of a laugh, 
or the roll of a carriage sounding down the summer air. 

It was eight o’clock; the sun was slanting to the west in a 
cloudless splendor, bathing the bright scene in a rich golden 
glow, and tinging to bronze the dark masses of the Black For- 
est. In another hour he was the expected guest of a Russian 
Prince at a dinner party, where all that was highest, fairest, 
greatest, most powerful, and most bewitching of every nation- 
ality represented there would meet; and in the midst of this 
radiant whirlpool of extravagance and pleasure, where every 
man worth owning as such was his friend, and every woman 
whose smile he cared for welcomed him, he knew himself as 
utterly alone, as utterly doomed, as the lifeless Prussian lying 
in the dead-house. Ho aid could serve him, for it would have 
been but to sink lower yet to ask or to take it ; no power could 
save him from the ruin which in a few days later at the farthest 
would mark him out forever an exiled, beggared, perhaps dis- 
honored man — a debtor and an alien. 

Where he had thrown himself on a bench beneath a mountain- 
ash, trying vainly to realize this thing which had come upon 
him — and to meet which not training, nor habit, nor a moment’s 
grave reflection had ever done the slightest to prepare him ; gaz- 
ing, blankly and unconsciously, at the dense pine woods and 
rugged glens of the Forest that sloped upward and around above 
the green and leafy nest of Baden — he watched mechanically 


126 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


the toiling passage of a charcoal-burner going up the hillside in 
distance through the firs. 

“ Those poor devils envy us ! ” he thought. “ Better be one 
of them ten thousand times than be trained for the Great Race, 
and started with the cracks, dead weighted with the penalty- 
shot of Poverty ! ” 

A soft touch came on his arm as he sat there; he looked up, 
surprised. Before him stood a dainty, delicate little form, all 
gay with white lace, and broideries, and rose ribbons, and float- 
ing hair fastened backward with a golden fillet; it was that 
of the little Lady Venetia, — the only daughter of the House of 
Lyonnesse, by a late marriage of his Grace, — the eight-year-old 
sister of the colossal Seraph; the plaything of a young and 
lovely mother, who had flirted in Belgravia with her future 
stepson before she fell sincerely and veritably in love with the 
gallant and still handsome Duke. 

Cecil roused himself and smiled at her; he had been by 
months together at Lyonnesse most years of the child’s life, and 
had been gentle to her as he was to every living thing, though 
he had noticed her seldom. 

“ Well, Petite Reine,” he said kindly, bitter as his thoughts 
were; calling her by the name she generally bore. “ All alone? 
Where are your playmates ? ” 

“ Petite Reine,” who, to justify her sobriquet, was a grand, 
imperial little lady, bent her delicate head — a very delicate 
head, indeed, carrying itself royally, young though it was. 

“ Ah ! you know I never care for children ! ” 

It was said so disdainfully, yet so sincerely, without a touch 
of affectation, and so genuinely, as the expression of a matured 
and contemptuous opinion, that even in that moment it amused 
him. She did not wait an answer, but bent nearer, with an 
infinite pity and anxiety in her pretty eyes. 

“I want to know — you are so vexed; are you not? They 
say you have lost all your money ! ” 

“ Do they ? They are not far wrong then. Who are ‘ they,’ 
Petite Reine ? ” 

“ Oh ! Prince Alexis, and the Due de Lorance, and mamma, 
and everybody. Is it true ? ” 

“Very true, my little lady.” 

“ Ah ! ” She gave a long sigh, looking pathetically at him, with 
her head on one side, and her lips parted ; “ I heard the Russian 
gentleman saying that you were ruined. Is that true, too ? ” 


“ PETITE HEINE.” 127 

“ Yes, dear,” he answered wearily, thinking little of the child 
in the desperate pass to which his life had come. 

Petite Heine stood by him silent; her proud, imperial young 
ladyship had a very tender heart, and she was very sorry; she 
had understood what had been said before her of him vaguely 
indeed, and with no sense of its true meaning, yet still with 
the quick perception of a brilliant and petted child. Looking 
at her, he saw with astonishment that her eyes were filled with 
tears. He put out his hand and drew her to him. 

“ Why, little one, what do you know of these things ? How 
did you find me out here ? ” 

She bent nearer to him, swaying her slender figure, with its 
bright gossamer muslins, like a dainty hare-bell, and lifting 
her face to his — earnest, beseeching, and very eager. 

“ I came — I came — please don’t be angry — because I heard 
them say you had no money, and I want you to take mine. Do 
take it ! Look, it is all bright gold, and it is my own, my very 
own. Papa gives it to me to do just what I like with. Do 
take it ; pray do ! ” 

Coloring deeply, for the Petite Peine had that true instinct 
of generous natures, — a most sensitive delicacy for others, — but 
growing ardent in her eloquence and imploring in her entreaty, 
she shook on to Cecil’s knee, out of a little enamel sweetmeat 
box, twenty bright Napoleons that fell in a glittering shower 
on the grass. 

He started, and looked at her in a silence that she mistook 
for offense. She leaned nearer, pale now with her excitement, 
and with her large eyes gleaming and melting with passionate 
entreaty. 

“ Don’t be angry ; pray take it ; it is all my own, and you 
know I have bonbons, and books, and playthings, and ponies, 
and dogs till I am tired of them; I never want the money; in- 
deed I don’t. Take it, please take it ; and if you will only let me 
ask Papa or Rock they will give you thousands and thousands of 
pounds, if that isn’t enough. Do let me ! ” 

Cecil, in silence still, stooped and drew her to him. When he 
spoke his voice shook ever so slightly, and he felt his eyes dim 
with an emotion that he had not known in all his careless life; 
the child’s words and action touched him deeply, the caressing, 
generous innocence of the offered gift, beside the enormous 
extravagance and hopeless bankruptcy of his career, smote him 
with a keen pang, yet moved him with a strange pleasure. 


128 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ Petite Reine,” he murmured gently, striving vainly for his 
old lightness, “ Petite Reine, how some man will love you one 
day ! Thank you from my heart, my little innocent friend.” 

Her face flushed with gladness; she smiled with all a child’s 
unshadowed joy. 

“ Ah ! then you will take it ! and if you want more only let 
me ask them for it; papa and Philip never refuse me any- 
thing ! ” 

His hand wandered gently over the shower of her hair, as 
he put back the .Napoleons that he had gathered up into her 
azure bonbonniere. 

“ Petite Reine, you are a little angel ; but I cannot take your 
money, my child, and you must ask for none for my sake from- 
your father or from Rock. Do not look so grieved, little one;. 
I love you none the less because I refuse it.” 

Petite Reine’s face was very pale and grave; a delicate face, 
in its miniature feminine childhood almost absurdly like the 
Seraph’s; her eyes were full of plaintive wonder and of pa- 
thetic reproach. 

“ Ah ! ” she said, drooping her head with a sigh ; “ it is no 
good to you because it is such a little; do let me ask for 
more ! ” 

He smiled, but the smile was very weary. 

“No, dear, you must not ask for more; I have been very 
foolish, my little friend, and I must take the fruits of my folly ; 
all men must. I can accept no one’s money, not even yours;, 
when you are older and remember this, you will know why. But 
I do not thank you the less from my heart.” 

She looked at him, pained and wistful. 

“You will not take anything, Mr. Cecil?” she asked with 
a sigh, glancing at her rejected Napoleons. 

He drew the enamel bonbonniere away. 

“ I will take that if you will give it me, Petite Reine, and 
keep it in memory of you.” 

As he spoke, he stooped and kissed her very gently; the act 
had moved him more deeply than he thought he had it in him 
to be moved by anything, and the child’s face turned upward 
to him was of a very perfect and aristocratic loveliness, far be- 
yond her years. She colored as his lips touched hers, and 
swayed slightly from him. She was an extremely proud young 
sovereign, and never allowed caresses; yet she lingered by him 
troubled, grave, with something intensely tender and pitiful in. 


129 


“ PETITE EEINE.” 

the musing look of her eyes. She had a perception that this 
calamity which smote him was one far beyond the ministering 
of her knowledge. 

He took the pretty Palais Royal gold-rimmed sweetmeat box, 
and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket. It was only a child’s 
gift, a tiny Paris toy ; but it had been brought to him in a 
tender compassion, and he did keep it; kept it through dark 
days and wild nights, through the scorch of the desert and the 
shadows of death, till the young eyes that questioned him now 
with such innocent wonder had gained the grander luster of 
their womanhood and had brought him a grief wider than he 
knew now. 

At that moment, as the child stood beside him under the 
drooping acacia boughs, with the green, sloping lower valley 
seen at glimpses through the wall of leaves, one of the men of 
the Stephanien approached him with an English letter, which, 
as it was marked “ instant,” they had laid apart from the rest 
of the visitors’ pile of correspondence. Cecil took it wearily — 
nothing but fresh embarrassments could come to him from Eng- 
land — and looked at the little Lady Yenetia. 

“ Will you allow me? ” 

She bowed her graceful head; with all the naif unconscious- 
ness of a child, she had all the manner of the veille cour; to- 
gether they made her enchanting. 

He broke the envelope and read — a blurred, scrawled, misera- 
ble letter ; the words erased with passionate strokes, and blotted 
with hot tears, and scored out in impulsive misery. It was 
long, yet at a glance he scanned its message and its meaning; 
at the first few words he knew its whole as well as though he 
had studied every line. 

A strong tremor shook him from head to foot, a tremor at 
once of passionate rage and of as passionate pain; his face 
blanched to a deadly whiteness; his teeth clinched as though 
he were restraining some bodily suffering, and he tore the letter 
in two and stamped it down into the turf under his heel, with a 
gesture as unlike his common serenity of manner as the fiery 
passion that darkened in his eyes was unlike the habitual soft- 
ness of his too pliant and too unresentful temper. He crushed 
the senseless paper again and again down into the grass beneath 
his heel ; his lips shook under the silky abundance of his beard ; 
the natural habit of long usage kept him from all utterance, 
and even in the violence of its shock he remembered the young 


130 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


Venetian presence; but, in that one fierce, unrestrained gesture 
the shame .and suffering upon him broke out, despite himself. 

The child watched him, startled and awed. She touched his 
hand softly. 

“ What is it ? Is it anything worse ? ” 

He turned his eyes on her with a dry, hot, weary anguish 
in them; he was scarcely conscious what he said or what he 
answered. 

“Worse — worse?” he repeated mechanically, while his heel 
still ground down in loathing the shattered paper into the 
grass. “ There can be nothing worse ! It is the vilest, blackest 
shame.” 

He spoke to his thoughts, not to her; the words died in his 
throat ; a bitter agony was on him ; all the golden summer even- 
ing, all the fair green world about him, were indistinct and un- 
real to his senses ; he felt as if the whole earth were of a sudden 
changed; he could not realize that this thing could come to 
him and his — that this foul dishonor could creep up and stain 
them — that this infamy could ever be of them and upon them. 
All the ruin that before had fallen on him to-day was dwarfed 
and banished; it looked nothing beside the unendurable horror 
that reached him now. 

The gay laughter of children sounded down the air at that 
moment; they were the children of a French Princess seeking 
their playmate Yenetia, who had escaped from them and from 
their games to find her way to Cecil. He motioned her to them;' 
he could not bear even the clear and pitying eyes of the Petite 
Reine to be upon him now. 

She lingered wistfully; she did not like to leave him. 

“ Let me stay with you,” she pleaded caressingly. “ You are 
vexed at something; I cannot help you, but Rock will — the 
Duke will. Do let me ask them ? ” 

He laid his hand on her shoulder; his voice, as he answered, 
was hoarse and unsteady. 

“ Ho; go, dear. You will please me best by leaving me. Ask 
none — tell none; I can trust you to be silent, Petite Reine.” 

She gave him a long, earnest look. 

“Yes,” she answered simply and gravely, as one who ac- 
cepts, and not lightly, a trust. 

Then she went slowly and lingeringly, with the sun on the 
gold fillet binding her hair, but the tears heavy on the shadow of 
her silken lashes. When next they met again the luster of 


“petite reine.” 131 

a warmer sun, that once burned on the white walls of the pal- 
aces of Phoenicia and the leaping flames of the Temple of the 
God of Healing, shone upon them ; and through the veil of those 
sweeping lashes there gazed the resistless sovereignty of a 
proud and patrician womanhood. 

Alone, his head sank down upon his hands; he gave reins to 
the fiery scorn, the acute suffering which turn by turn seized 
him with every moment that seared the words of the letter 
deeper and deeper down into his brain. Until this he had never 
known what it was to suffer; until this his languid creeds had 
held that no wise man feels strongly, and that to glide through 
life untroubled and unmoved is as possible as it is politic. Now 
he suffered, he suffered dumbly as a dog, passionately as a bar- 
barian; now he was met by that which, in the moment of its 
dealing, pierced his panoplies of indifference, and escaped his 
light philosophies. 

“ Oh, God ! ” he thought, “ if it were anything — anything — 
except Disgrace ! ” 

In a miserable den, an hour or so before — there are misera- 
ble dens even in Baden, that gold-decked rendezvous of princes, 
where crowned heads are numberless as couriers, and great min- 
isters must sometimes be content with a shakedown — two men 
sat in consultation. Though the chamber was poor and dark, 
their table was loaded with various expensive wines and 
liqueurs. Of a truth they were flush of money, and selected this 
poor place from motives of concealment rather than of neces- 
sity. One of them was the “welsher,” Ben Davis; the other, 
a smaller, quieter man, with a keen, vivacious Hebrew eye and 
an olive-tinted skin, a Jew, Ezra Baroni. The Jew was cool, 
sharp, and generally silent ; the “ welsher,” heated, eager, flushed 
with triumph, and glowing with a gloating malignity. Excite- 
ment and the fire of very strong wines, of whose vintage brandy 
formed a large part, had made him voluble in exultation; the 
monosyllabic sententiousness that had characterized him in the 
loose-box at Boyallieu had been dissipated under the ardor of 
success; and Ben Davis, with his legs on the table, a pipe be- 
tween his teeth, and his bloated face purple with a brutal con- 
tentment, might have furnished to a Teniers the personification 
of culminated cunning and of delighted tyranny. 

“ That precious Guards’ swell ! ” he muttered gloatingly, for 
the hundredth time. “ I’ve paid him out at last ! He won’t take 


132 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


a ‘ walk over ’ again in a hurry. Cuss them swells ! they allays 
die so game ; it aint half a go after all, giving ’em a facer ; they 
just come up to time so cool under it all, and never show they 
are down, even when their backers throw up the sponge. You 
can’t make ’em give in, not even when they’re mortal hit; that’s 
the crusher of it.” 

“ Veil, vhat matter that ven you have hit ’em? ” expostulated 
the more philosophic Jew. 

“ Why, it is a fleecin’ of one,” retorted the welsher savagely, 
even amid his successes. “ A clear fleecin’ of one. If one gets 
the better of a dandy chap like that, and brings him down neat 
and clean, one ought to have the spice of it. One ought to see 
him wince and — cuss ’em all! — that’s just what they’ll never 
do. No ! not if it was ever so. You may pitch into ’em like Old 

Harry, and those d d fine gentlemen ’ll just look as if they 

liked it. You might strike ’em dead at your feet, and it’s my 
belief, while they was cold as stones they’d manage to look not 
beaten yet. It’s a fleecin’ of one — a fleecin’ of one ! ” he growled 
afresh; draining down a great draught of brandy-heated Rous- 
sillon to drown the impatient conviction which possessed him 
that, let him triumph as he would, there would ever remain, 
in that fine intangible sense which his coarse nature could feel, 
though he could not have further defined it, a superiority in 
his adversary he could not conquer; a difference between him 
and his prey he could not bridge over. 

The Jew laughed a little. 

“ Vot a shild you are, you Big Ben! Vot matter how he 
look, so long as you have de success and pocket de monish ? ” 

Big Ben gave a long growl, like a mastiff tearing to reach 
a bone just held above him. 

“ Hang the blunt ! The yellows aint a quarter worth to me 
what it ’ud be to see him just look as if he knew he was 
knocked over. Besides, laying agin’ him by that ere commis- 
sion’s piled up hatsful of the ready, to be sure; I don’t say it 
haint; but there’s two thou’ knocked off for Willon, and the 
fool don’t deserve a tizzy of it. He went and put the paint 
on so thick that, if the Club don’t have a flare-up about the 
whole thing ” 

“Let dem!” said the Jew serenely. “Dey can do vot dey 
like ; dey von’t get to de bottom of de veil. Dat Villon is sharp ; 
he vill know how to keep his tongue still ; dey can prove nothin’ ; 
dey may give de sack to a stable-boy, or dey may tink dem- 


“petite reine.” 133 

selves mighty bright in seem’ a mare’s nest, but dey vill never 
come to us.” 

The welsher gave a loud, hoarse guffaw of relish and enjoy- 
ment. 

“No! We know the ins and outs of Turf Law a trifle too 
well to be caught napping. A neater thing weren’t ever done, if 
it hadn’t been that the paint was put a trifle too thick. The 
’oss should have just run ill, and not knocked over, clean out 
o’ time like that. However, there aint no odds a-cryin’ over 
spilt milk. If the Club do come a inquiry, we’ll show ’em a few 
tricks that ’ll puzzle ’em. But it’s my belief they’ll let it off on 
the quiet; there aint a bit of evidence to show the ’oss was 
doctored, and the way he went stood quite as well for having 
been knocked off his feed and off his legs by the woyage and 
sich like. And now you go and put that swell to the grind- 
stone for Act 2 of the comedy ; will yer ? ” 

Ezra Baroni smiled, where he leaned against the table, look- 
ing over some papers. 

“ Dis is a delicate matter ; don’t you come putting your big 
paw in it — you’ll spoil it all.” 

Ben Davis growled afresh: 

“No, I aint a-goin’. You know as well as me I can’t show 
in the thing. Hanged if I wouldn’t a’most lief risk a lifer out 
at Bptany Bay for the sake o’ wringin’ my fine-feathered bird 
myself, but I daresn’t. If he was to see me in it, all ’ud be 
up. You must do it. Get along; you look uncommon respecta- 
ble. If your coat-tails was a little bit longer, you might right 
and away be took for a parson.” 

The Jew laughed softly, the welsher grimly, at the compli- 
ment they paid the Church; Baroni put up his papers into a 
neat Russia letter book. Excellently dressed, without a touch 
of flashiness, he did look eminently respectable — and lingered 
a moment. 

“ I say, dear shild ; vat if de Marquis vant to buy off and 
hush up ? Ten to von he vill ; he care no more for monish than 
for dem macaroons, and he love his friend, dey say.” 

Ben Davis took his legs off the table with a crash, and stood 
up, flushed, thirstily eager, almost aggressive in his peremptory 
excitement. 

“Without wringing my dainty bird’s neck? Not for a mil- 
lion paid out o’ hand! Without crushing my fine gentleman 
down into powder? Not for all the blunt of every one o’ the 


134 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


Rothschilds! Curse his woman’s face! I’ve got to keep dark 
now; but when he’s crushed, and smashed, and ruined, and pil- 
loried, and druv’ out of this fine world, and warned off of all his 
aristocratic race-courses, then I’ll come in and take a look at 
him; then I’ll see my brilliant gentleman a worn-out, broken- 
down swindler, a-dyin’ in a bagnio ! ” 

The intense malignity, the brutal hungry lust for vengeance 
that inspired the words, lent their coarse vulgarity something 
that was for the moment almost tragical in its strength ; almost 
horrible in its passion. Ezra Baroni looked at him quietly, 
then without another word went out — to a congenial task. 

“ Dat big shild is a fool,” mused the subtler and gentler Jew. 
“Vengeance is but de breath of de vind; it blow for you one 
day, it blow against you de next; de only real good is monish.” 

The Seraph had ridden back from Iffesheim to the Bad in 
company with some Austrian officers, and one or two of his 
own comrades. He had left the Course late, staying to exhaust 
every possible means of inquiry as to the failure of Forest King, 
and to discuss with other members of the Newmarket and for- 
eign jockey clubs the best methods — if method there were— 
of discovering what foul play had been on foot with the horse. 
That there was some, and very foul too, the testimony of men 
and angels would not have dissuaded the Seraph ; and the event 
had left him most unusually grave and regretful. 

The amount he had lost himself, in consequence, was of not 
the slightest moment to him, although he was extravagant 
enough to run almost to the end even of his own princely tether 
in money matters ; but that “ Beauty ” should be cut down was 
more vexatious to him than any evil accident that could have 
befallen himself, and he guessed pretty nearly the terrible in- 
fluence the dead failure would have on his friend’s position. 

True, he had never heard Cecil breathe a syllable that hinted 
at embarrassment; but these things get known with tolerable 
accuracy about town, and those who were acquainted, as most 
people in their set were, with the impoverished condition 
of the Royallieu exchequer, however hidden it might be under 
an unabated magnificence of living, were well aware also that 
none of the old Viscount’s sons could have any safe resources 
to guarantee them from as rapid a ruin as they liked to con- 
summate. Indeed, it had of late been whispered that it was 
probable, despite the provisions of the entail, that all the green 


“petite keine.” 135 

wealth and Norman beauty of Royallieu itself would come into 
the market. Hence the Seraph, the best-hearted and most 
generous-natured of men, was worried by an anxiety and a 
despondency which he would never have indulged, most as- 
suredly, on his own account, as he rode away from Iffesheim 
after the defeat of his Corps’ champion. 

He was expected to dinner with one of the most lovely of 
foreign Ambassadresses, and was to go with her afterward to 
the Vaudeville, at the pretty golden theater, where a troupe 
from the Bouffes were playing; but he felt anything but in the 
mood for even her bewitching and — in a marriageable sense — 
safe society, as he stopped his horse at his own hotel, the 
Badischer Hof. 

As he swung himself out of saddle, a well-dressed, quiet, 
rather handsome little man drew near respectfully, lifting his 
hat — it was M. Baroni. The Seraph had never seen the man 
in his life that he knew of, but he was himself naturally frank, 
affable, courteous, and never given to hedging himself behind 
the pale of his high rank; provided you did not bore him, you 
might always get access to him easily enough — the Duke used 
to tell him, too easily. 

Therefore, when Ezra Baroni deferentially approached with, 
“The Most Noble the Marquis of Rockingham, I think?” the 
Seraph, instead of leaving the stranger there discomfited, 
nodded and paused with his inconsequent good nature; thinking 
how much less bosh it would be if everybody could call him, like 
his family and his comrades, “ Rock.” 

“ That is my name,” he answered. “ I do not know you. Do 
you want anything of me ? ” 

The Seraph had a vivid terror of people who “wanted him,” 
in the subscription, not the police, sense of the word; and had 
been the victim of frauds innumerable. 

“ I wished,” returned Baroni respectfully, but with sufficient 
independence to conciliate his auditor, whom he saw at a glance 
cringing subservience would disgust, “ to have the opportunity 
of asking your lordship a very simple question.” 

The Seraph looked a little bored, a little amused. 

“ Well, ask it, my good fellow; you have your opportunity! ” 
he said impatiently, yet good-humored still. 

“ Then would you, my lord,” continued the Jew with his 
strong Hebrew-German accent, “be so good as to favor me by 
saying whether this signature be your own ? ” 


136 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


The Jew held before him a folded paper, so folded that one 
line only was visible, across which was dashed in bold char- 
acters, “ Rockingham.” 

The Seraph put up his eye-glass, stooped, and took a stead- 
fast look; then shook his head. 

“No; that is not mine; at least, I think not. Never made 
my R half a quarter so well in my life.” 

“ Many thanks, my lord,” said Baroni quietly. “ One ques- 
tion more and we can substantiate the fact. Did your lord- 
ship indorse any bill on the 15th of last month ? ” 

The Seraph looked surprised, and reflected a moment. “ No, 
I didn’t,” he said, after a pause. “ I have done it for men, but 
not on that day; I was shooting at Hornsey Wood most of it, 
if I remember right. Why do you ask ? ” 

“ I will tell you, my lord, if you grant me a private inter- 
view.” 

The Seraph moved away. “Never do that,” he said briefly; 
u private interviews,” thought he, acting on past experience, 
“with women always mean proposals, and with men always 
mean extortion.” 

Baroni made a quick movement toward him. 

“ An instant, my lord ! This intimately concerns yourself. 
The steps of an hotel are surely not the place in which to speak 
of it ? ” 

“ I wish to hear nothing about it,” replied Rock, putting him 
aside ; while he thought to himself regretfully, “ That is ‘ stifl,’ 
that bit of paper; perhaps some poor wretch is in a scrape. I 
wish I hadn’t so wholly denied my signature. If the mischief’s 
done, there’s no good in bothering the fellow.” 

The Seraph’s good nature was apt to overlook such trifles as 
the Law. 

Baroni kept pace with him as he approached the hotel door, 
and spoke very low. 

“ My lord, if you do not listen, worse may befall the reputa- 
tion both of your regiment and your friends.” 

The Seraph swung round; his careless, handsome face set 
stern in an instant; his blue eyes grave, and gathering an 
ominous fire. 

“ Step yonder,” he said curtly, signing the Hebrew toward the 
grand staircase. “ Show that person to my rooms, Alexis.” 

But for the publicity of the entrance of the Badischer Hof 
the mighty right arm of the Guardsman might have terminated 


“petite eeike.” 137^ 

the interview then and there, in different fashion. Baroni had 
gained his point, and was ushered into the fine chambers set 
apart for the future Duke of Lyonnesse. The Seraph strode 
after him, and as the attendant closed the door and left them 
alone in the first of the great lofty suite, all glittering with 
gilding, and ormolu, and malachite, and rose velvet, and 
Parisian taste, stood like a tower above the Jew’s small, slight 
form; while his words came curtly, and only by a fierce effort 
through his lips. 

“ Substantiate what you dare to say, or my grooms shall 
throw you out of that window! Now? ” 

Baroni looked up, unmoved; the calm, steady, undisturbed 
glance sent a chill over the Seraph; he thought if this man 
came but for purposes of extortion, and were not fully sure 
that he could make good what he had said, this was not the 
look he would give. 

“ I desire nothing better, my lord,” said Baroni quietly,. 
“ though I greatly regret to be the messenger of such an errand. 
This bill, which in a moment I will have the honor of show- 
ing you, was transacted by my house (I am one of the part- 
ners of a London discounting firm), indorsed thus by your cele- 
brated name. Moneys were lent on it, the bill was made paya- 
ble at two months’ date; it was understood that you accepted 
it; there could be no risk with such a signature as yours. The 
bill was negotiated; I was in Leyden, Lubeck, and other places, 
at the period ; I heard nothing of the matter. When I returned 
to London, a little less than a week ago, I saw the signature for 
the first time. I was at once aware that it was not yours, for 
I had some paid bills, signed by you, at hand, with which I com- 
pared it. Of course, my only remedy was to seek you out, al- 
though I was nearly certain, before your present denial, that 
the bill was a forgery.” 

He spoke quite tranquilly still, with a perfectly respectful 
regret, but with the air of a man who has his title to be heard, 
and is acting simply in his own clear right. The Seraph lis- 
tened, restless, impatient, sorely tried to keep in the passion 
which had been awakened by the hint that this wretched matter 
could concern or attaint the honor of his corps. 

“ Well! speak out! ” he said impatiently. “Details are noth- 
ing. Who drew it? Who forged my name, if it be forged? 
Quick! give me the paper.” 

“'With every trust and every deference, my lord, I cannot 


138 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


let the bill pass out of my own hands until this unfortunate 
matter be cleared up — if cleared up it can be. Your lordship 
shall see the bill, however, of course, spread here upon the table ; 
but first, let me warn you, my Lord Marquis, that the sight will 
be intensely painful to you. 

“ Very painful, my lord,” added Baroni impressively. “ Pre- 
pare yourself for ” 

Rock dashed his hand down on the marble table with a force 
that made the lusters and statuettes on it ring and tremble. 

“No more words ! Lay the bill there.” 

Baroni bowed and smoothed out upon the console the crum- 
pled document, holding it with one hand, yet leaving visible 
with the counterfeited signature one other, the name of the 
forger in whose favor the bill was drawn; that other signature 
was — “ Bertie Cecil.” 

“ I deeply regret to deal you such a blow from such a friend, 
my lord,” said the Jew softly. The Seraph stooped and gazed 
— one instant of horrified amazement kept him dumb there, 
staring at the written paper as at some ghastly thing; then all 
the hot blood rushed over his fair, bold face; he flung himself 
on the Hebrew, and, ere the other could have breath or warning, 
tossed him upward to the painted ceiling and hurled him down 
again upon the velvet carpet, as lightly as a retriever will catch 
up and let fall a wild duck or a grouse, and stood over Baroni 
where he lay. 

“You hound!” 

Baroni, lying passive and breathless with the violence of the 
shock and the surprise, yet kept, even amid the hurricane 
of wrath that had tossed him upward and downward as the winds 
toss leaves, his hold upon the document, and his clear, cool, 
ready self-possession. 

“ My lord,” he said faintly, “ I do not wonder at your excite- 
ment, aggressive as it renders you; but I cannot admit that 
false which I know to be a for ” 

“ Silence ! Say that word once more, and I shall forget my- 
self and hurl you out into the street like the dog of a Jew you 
are ! ” 

“Have patience an instant, my lord. Will it profit your 
friend and brother-in-arms if it be afterward said that when 
this charge was brought against him, you, my Lord Rocking- 
ham, had so little faith in his power to refute it that you bore 
down with all your mighty strength in a personal assault upon 


“petite reine.” 139 

one so weakly as myself, and sought to put an end to the evi- 
dence against him by bodily threats against my safety, and by — 
what will look legally, my lord, like — an attempt to coerce me 
into silence and to obtain the paper from my hands by vio- 
lence ? ” 

Faint and hoarse the words were, but they were spoken with 
quiet confidence, with admirable acumen; they were the very 
words to lash the passions of his listener into unendurable fire, 
yet to chain them powerless down; the Guardsman stood above 
him, his features flushed and dark with rage, his eyes literally 
blazing with fury, his lips working under his tawny, leonine 
beard. At every syllable he could have thrown himself afresh 
upon the Jew and flung him out of his presence as so much 
carrion ; yet the impotence that truth so often feels, caught and 
meshed in the coils of subtlety — the desperate disadvantage at 
which Right is so often placed, when met by the cunning science 
and sophistry of Wrong — held the Seraph in their net now. He 
saw his own rashness, he saw how his actions could be construed 
till they cast a slur even on the man he defended; he saw how 
legally he was in error, how legally the gallant vengeance of 
an indignant friendship might be construed into consciousness 
of guilt in the accused for whose sake the vengeance fell. 

He stood silent, overwhelmed with the intensity of his own 
passion, baffled by the ingenuity of a serpent-wisdom he could 
not refute. 

Ezra Baroni saw his advantage. He ventured to raise him- 
self slightly. 

“ My lord, since your faith in your friend is so perfect, send 
for him. If he be innocent, and I a liar, with a look I shall 
be confounded.” 

The tone was perfectly impassive, but the words expressed 
a world. For a moment the Seraph’s eyes flashed on him with 
a look that made him feel nearer his death than he had been 
near to it in all his days; but Rockingham restrained himself 
from force. 

“ I will send for him,” he said briefly ; in that answer there 
was more of menace and of meaning than in any physical action. 

He moved and let Baroni rise; shaken and bruised, but other- 
wise little seriously hurt, and still holding, in a tenacious grasp, 
the crumpled paper. He rang; his own servant answered the 
summons. 

“ Go to the Stephanien and inquire for Mr. Cecil. Be quick ; 


140 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


and request him, wherever he be, to be so good as to come to 
me instantly — here.” 

The servant bowed and withdrew; a perfect silence followed 
between these two so strangely assorted companions ; the Seraph 
stood with his back against the mantelpiece, with every sense 
on the watch to catch every movement of the Jew’s, and to hear 
the first sound of Cecil’s approach. The minutes dragged on; 
the Seraph was in an agony of probation and impatience. Once 
the attendants entered to light the chandeliers and candelabra; 
the full light fell on the dark, slight form of the Hebrew, and 
on the superb attitude and the fair, frank, proud face of the 
standing Guardsman; neither moved — once more they were left 
alone. 

The moments ticked slowly away one by one, audible in the 
silence. Now and then the quarters chimed from the clock; it 
was the only sound in the chamber. 


CHAPTER XI. 


FOR A WOMAN’S SAKE. 

The door opened — Cecil entered. 

The Seraph crossed the room, with his hand held out; not 
for his life in that moment would he have omitted that gesture 
of friendship. Involuntarily he started and stood still one in- 
stant in amaze ; the next, he flung thought away and dashed into 
swift, inconsequent words. 

“ Cecil, my dear fellow ! I’m ashamed to send for you on such 
a blackguard errand. Never heard of such a swindler’s trick 
in all my life; couldn’t pitch the fellow into the street because 
of the look of the thing, and can’t take any other measures 
without you, you know. I only sent for you to expose the whole 

abominable business, never because I believe Hang it! 

Beauty, I can’t bring myself to say it even ! If a sound thrash- 
ing would have settled the matter, I wouldn’t have bothered 
you about it, nor told you a syllable. Only you are sure, Bertie, 
aren’t you, that I never listened to this miserable outrage on 
us both with a second’s thought there could be truth in it? You 
know me ? you trust me too well not to be certain of that ? ” 

The incoherent address poured out from his lips in a breath- 
less torrent; he had never been so excited in his life; and he 
pleaded with as imploring an earnestness as though he had 
been the suspected criminal, not to be accused with having one 
shadow of shameful doubt against his friend. His words would 
have told nothing except bewilderment to one who should have 
been a stranger to the subject on which he spoke; yet Cecil 
never asked even what he meant. There was no surprise upon 
his face, no flush of anger, no expression of amaze or indigna- 
tion; only the look which had paralyzed Rock on his entrance; 
he stood still and mute. 

The Seraph looked at him, a great dread seizing him lest 
he should have seemed himself to cast this foul thing on his 
brother-in-arms; and in that dread all the fierce fire of his 
freshly-loosened passion broke its bounds. 

141 


142 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ Damnation ! Cecil, can’t you hear me ? A hound has 
brought against you the vilest charge that ever swindlers 
framed : an infamy that he deserves to be shot for, as if he were 
a dog. He makes me stand before you as if I were your ac- 
cuser; as if I doubted you; as if I lent an ear one second to 
his loathsome lie. I sent for you to confront him, and to give 
him up to the law. Stand out, you scoundrel, and let us see 
how you dare look at us now ! ” 

He swung round at the last words, and signed to Baroni to 
rise from the couch where he sat. The Jew advanced slowly, 
softly. 

“ If your lordship will pardon me, you have scarcely made 
it apparent what the matter is for which this gentleman is 
wanted. You have scarcely explained to him that it is on a 
charge of forgery.” 

The Seraph’s eyes flashed on him with a light like a lion’s, 
and his right hand clinched hard. 

“ By my life ! if you say that word again you shall be flung 
in the street like the cur you are, let me pay what I will for 
it ! Cecil, why don’t you speak ? ” 

Bertie had not moved; not a breath escaped his lips. He 
stood like a statue, deadly pale in the gaslight ; when the figure 
of Baroni rose up and came before him, a great darkness stole 
on his face — it was a terrible bitterness, a great horror, a 
loathing disgust; but it was scarcely criminality, and it was 
not fear. Still he stood perfectly silent — a guilty man, any 
other than his loyal friend would have said: guilty, and con- 
fronted with a just accuser. The Seraph saw that look, and 
a deadly chill passed over him, as it had done at the Jew’s first 
charge — not doubt; such heresy to his creeds, such shame to 
his comrade and his corps could not be in him; but a vague 
dread hushed his impetuous vehemence. The dignity of the 
old Lyonnesse blood asserted its ascendency. 

“ M. Baroni, make your statement. Later on Mr. Cecil can 
avenge it.” 

Cecil never moved; once his eyes went to Rockingham with 
a look of yearning, grateful, unendurable pain; but it was re- 
pressed instantly; a perfect passiveness was on him. The Jew 
smiled. 

“ My statement is easily made, and will not be so new to 
this gentleman as it was to your lordship. I simply charge the 
Honorable Bertie Cecil with having negotiated a bill with my 


143 


FOR A WOMAN’S SAKE. 

firm for £750, on the 15th of last month, drawn in his own 
favor, and accepted at two months’ date by your lordship. Your 
signature you, my Lord Marquis, admit to be a forgery — with 
that forgery I charge your friend ! ” 

“ The 15th!” 

The echo of those words alone escaped the dry, white lips 
of Cecil; he showed no amaze, no indignation; once only, as 
the charge was made, he gave a sudden gesture, with a sudden 
gleam, so dark, so dangerous, in his eyes, that his comrade 
thought and hoped that with one moment more the Jew would 
be dashed down at his feet with the lie branded on his mouth 
by the fiery blow of a slandered and outraged honor. The action 
was repressed; the extraordinary quiescence, more hopeless be- 
cause more resigned than any sign of pain or of passion, re- 
turned either by force of self-control or by the stupor of despair. 

The Seraph gazed at him with a fixed, astounded horror; he 
could not believe his senses; he could not realize what he saw. 
His dearest friend stood mute beneath the charge of lowest 
villainy — stood powerless before the falsehoods of a Jew ex- 
tortioner ! 

u Bertie ! Great Heaven ! ” he cried, well-nigh beside him- 
self, “ how can you stand silent there ? Do you hear — do you 
hear aright? Do you know the accursed thing this conspiracy 
has tried to charge you with? Say something, for the love of 
God! I will have vengeance on your slanderer, if you take 
none.” 

He had looked for the rise of the same passion that rang in 
his own imperious words, for the fearless wrath of an insulted 
gentleman, the instantaneous outburst of a contemptuous de- 
nial, the fire of scorn, the lightning flash of fury — all that he 
gave himself, all that must be so naturally given by a slandered 
man under a libel that brands him with disgrace. He had 
looked for these as surely as he looked for the setting of one 
sun and the rise of another; he would have staked his life on 
the course of his friend’s conduct as he would upon his own, 
and a ghastly terror sent a pang to his heart. 

Still — Cecil stood silent; there was a strange, set, repressed 
anguish on his face that made it chill as stone; there was an 
unnatural calm upon him ; yet he lifted his head with a gesture 
haughty for the moment as any action that his defender could 
have wished. 

“ I am not guilty,” he said simply. 


144 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


The Seraph’s hands were on his own in a close, eager grasp 
almost ere the words were- spoken. 

“ Beauty, Beauty ! never say that to me. Do you think I 
can ever doubt you ? ” 

For a moment Cecil’s head sank; the dignity with which he 
had spoken remained on him, but the scorn of his defiance and 
his denial faded. 

“No; you cannot; you never will.” 

The words were spoken almost mechanically, like a man in 
a dream. Ezra Baroni, standing calmly there with the tran- 
quillity that an assured power alone confers, smiled slightly 
once more. 

“You are not guilty, Mr. Cecil? I shall be charmed if we 
can find it so. Your proofs?” 

“ Proof ? I give you my word.” 

Baroni bowed, with a sneer at once insolent but subdued. 

“We men of business, sir, are — perhaps inconveniently for 
gentlemen — given to a preference in favor of something more 
substantial. Your word, doubtless, is your bond among your 
acquaintance; it is a pity for you that your friend’s name 
should have been added to the bond you placed with us. Busi- 
ness men’s pertinacity is a little wearisome, no doubt, to of- 
ficers and members of the aristocracy like yourself; but all the 
same I must persist — how can you disprove this charge ? ” 

The Seraph turned on him with the fierceness of a blood- 
hound. 

“ You dog ! If you use that tone again in my presence, I will 
double- thong you till you cannot breathe ! ” 

Baroni laughed a little; he felt secure now, and could not; 
resist the pleasure of braving and of torturing the “ aristo- 
crats.” 

“I don’t doubt your will or your strength, my lord; but 
neither do I doubt the force of the law to make you account for 
any brutality of the prize-ring your lordship may please to exert 
on me.” 

The Seraph ground his heel into the carpet. 

“We waste words on that wretch,” he said abruptly to Cecil. 
“Prove his insolence the lie it is, and we will deal with him 
later on.” 

“Precisely what I said, my lord,” murmured Baroni. “Let 
Mr. Cecil prove his innocence.” 

Into Bertie’s eyes came a hunted, driven desperation. He 


FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE. 


145 


turned them on Rockingham with a look that cut him to the 
heart; yet the abhorrent thought crossed him — was it thus that 
men guiltless looked? 

“ Mr. Cecil was with my partner at 7.50 on the evening of 
the 15th. It was long over business hours, but my partner to 
oblige him stretched a point,” pursued the soft, bland, malicious 
voice of the German Jew. “ If he were not at our office — where 
was he? That is simple enough.” 

“ Answered in a moment ! ” said the Seraph, with impetuous 
certainty. “ Cecil ! — to prove this man what he is, not for an 
instant to satisfy me — where were you at that time on the 
15th?” 

“ The 15th! ” 

“Where were you?” pursued his friend. “Were you at 
mess? at the clubs? dressing for dinner? — where — where? 
There must be thousands of ways of remembering — thousands 
of people who’ll prove it for you ? ” 

Cecil stood mute still; his teeth clinched on his under lip. 
He could not speak — a woman’s reputation lay in his silence. 

“Can’t you remember?” implored the Seraph. “You will 
think — you must think ! ” 

There was a feverish entreaty in his voice. That hunted 
helplessness with which a question so slight yet so momentous 
was received, was forcing in on him a thought that he flung 
away like an asp. 

Cecil looked both of them full in the eyes — both his accuser 
and his friend. He was held as speechless as though his tongue 
were paralyzed; he was bound by his word of honor; he was 
weighted with a woman’s secret. 

“ Don’t look at me so, Bertie, for mercy’s sake ! Speak ! 
where were you ? ” 

“ I cannot tell you ; but I was not there.” 

The words were calm; there was a great resolve in them, 
moreover ; but his voice was hoarse and his lips shook. He paid 
a bitter price for the butterfly pleasure of a su mm er-day 
love. 

“ Cannot tell me ? — cannot ? You mean you have forgotten ! ” 

“I cannot tell you; it is enough.” 

There was an almost fierce and sullen desperation in the 
answer; its firmness was not shaken, but the ordeal was terri- 
ble. A woman’s reputation — a thing so lightly thrown away 
with an idler’s word, a Lovelace’s smile! — that was all he had 


146 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


to sacrifice to clear himself from the toils gathering around 
him. That was all ! And his word of honor. 

Baroni bent his head with an ironic mockery of sympathy. 

“ I feared so, my lord. Mr. Cecil ‘ cannot tell.’ As it hap- 
pens, my partner can tell. Mr. Cecil was with him at the hour 
and on the day I specify; and Mr. Cecil transacted with him 
the bill that I have had the honor of showing you ” 

“ Let me see it.” 

The request was peremptory to imperiousness, yet Cecil would 
have faced his death far sooner than he would have looked upon 
that piece of paper. 

Baroni smiled. 

“ It is not often that we treat gentlemen under misfortune 
in the manner we treat you, sir; they are usually dealt with 
more summarily, less mercifully. You must excuse altogether 
my showing you the document; both you and his lordship are 
officers skilled, I believe, in the patrician science of fist-attack.” 

He could not deny himself the pleasure and the rarity of 
insolence to the men before him, so far above him in social rank, 
yet at that juncture so utterly at his mercy. 

“You mean that we should fall foul of you and seize it?” 
thundered Rockingham in the magnificence of his wrath. “ Do 
you judge the world by your own wretched villainies? Let 
him see the paper ; lay it there, or, as there is truth on earth, 
I will kill you where you stand.” 

The Jew quailed under the fierce flashing of those leonine 
eyes. He bowed with that tact which never forsook him. 

“I confide it to your honor, my Lord Marquis,” he said, as 
he spread out the bill on the console. He was an able diplo- 
matist. 

Cecil leaned forward and looked at the signatures dashed 
across the paper; both who saw him saw also the shiver, like 
a shiver of intense cold, that ran through him as he did so, and 
saw his teeth clinch tight, in the extremity of rage, in the ex- 
cess of pain, or — to hold in all utterance that might be on his 
lips. 

“ Well? ” asked the Seraph, in a breathless anxiety. He knew 
not what to believe, what to do, whom to accuse of, or how to 
unravel this mystery of villainy and darkness ; but he felt, with 
a sickening reluctance which drove him wild, that his friend 
did not act in this thing as he should have acted; not as men 
of assured innocence and secure honor act beneath such a 


147 


FOE A WOMAN’S SAKE. 

charge. Cecil was unlike himself, unlike every deed and word 
of his life, unlike every thought of the Seraph’s fearless ex- 
pectance, when he had looked for the coming of the accused as 
the signal for the sure and instant unmasking, condemnation, 
and chastisement of the false accuser. 

“ Do you still persist in denying your criminality in the face 
of that bill, Mr. Cecil ? ” asked the bland, sneering, courteous 
voice of Ezra Baroni. 

“ I do. I never wrote either of these signatures ; I never saw 
that document until to-night.” 

The answer was firmly given, the old blaze of scorn came 
again in his weary eyes, and his regard met calmly and un- 
flinchingly the looks fastened on him ; but the nerves of his lips 
twitched, his face was haggard as by a night’s deep gambling; 
there was a heavy dew on his forehead — it was not the face of 
a wholly guiltless, of a wholly unconscious man; often even as 
innocence may be unwittingly betrayed into what wears the 
semblance of self-condemnation. 

“ And yet you equally persist in refusing to account for your 
occupation of the early evening hours of the 15th? Unfortu- 
nate ! ” 

“ I do ; but in your account of them you lie ! ” 

There was a sternness inflexible as steel in the brief sentence. 
Under it for an instant, though not visibly, Baroni flinched; 
and a fear of the man he accused smote him, more deep, more 
keen than that with which the sweeping might of the Seraph’s 
fury had moved him. He knew now why Ben Davis had hated 
with so deadly a hatred the latent strength that slept under the 

Quietest languor and nonchalance of “ the d d Guards’ 

swell.” 

What he felt, however, did not escape him by the slightest 
sign. 

“ As a matter of course you deny it ! ” he said, with a polite 
wave of his hand. “Quite right; you are not required to 
criminate yourself. I wish sincerely we were not compelled to 
criminate you.” 

The Seraph’s grand, rolling voice broke in; he had stood 
chafing, chained, panting, in agonies of passion and of misery. 

“ M. Baroni ! ” he said hotly, the furious vehemence of his 
anger and his bewilderment obscuring in him all memory of 
either law or fact, “you have heard his signature and your 
statements alike denied once for all by Mr. Cecil. Your docu- 


118 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


ment is a libel and a conspiracy, like your charge; it is false, 
and you are swindling ; it is an outrage, and you are a scoundrel ; 
you have schemed this infamy for the sake of extortion; not a 
sovereign will you obtain through it. Were the accusation you 
dare to make true, I am the only one whom it can concern, since 
it is my name which is involved. Were it true — could it pos- 
sibly be true — I should forbid any steps to be taken in it; I 
should desire it ended once and forever. It shall be so now, by 
God!” 

He scarcely knew what he was saying; yet what he did say, 
utterly as it defied all checks of law or circumstance, had so 
gallant a ring, had so kingly a wrath, that it awed and im- 
pressed even Baroni in the instant of its utterance. 

“ They say that those fine gentlemen fight like a thousand 
lions when they are once roused,” he thought. “ I can be- 
lieve it.” 

“ My lord,” he said softly, “ you have called me by many 
epithets, and menaced me with many threats since I have en- 
tered this chamber; it is not a wise thing to do with a man who 
knows the law. However, I can allow for the heat of your ex- 
citement. As regards the rest of your speech, you will permit 
me to say that its wildness of language is only equaled by the 
utter irrationality of your deductions and your absolute ig- 
norance of all legalities; Were you alone concerned and alone 
the discoverer of this fraud, you could prosecute or not as you 
please; but we are the subjects of its imposition, ours is the 
money that he has obtained by that forgery, and we shall in 
consequence open the prosecution.” 

“ Prosecution ? ” The echo rang in an absolute agony from 
his hearer ; he had thought of it as, at its worst, only a question 
between himself and Cecil. 

The accused gave no sign, the rigidity and composure he 
had sustained throughout did not change; but at the Seraph’s 
accent the hunted and pathetic misery which had once before 
gleamed in his eyes came there again; he held his comrade in 
a loyal and exceeding love. He would have let all the world 
stone him, but he could not have borne that his friend should 
cast even a look of contempt. 

“ Prosecution ! ” replied Baroni quietly. “ It is a matter of 
course, my lord, that Mr. Cecil denies the accusation; it is very 
wise; the law specially cautions the accused to say nothing to 
criminate themselves. But we waste time in words; and, par- 


149 


FOR A WOMAN’S SAKE. 

don me, if you have your friend’s interest at heart, you will 
withdraw this very stormy championship; this utterly useless 
opposition to an inevitable line of action. I must arrest Mr. 
Cecil ; but I am willing — for I know to high families these mis- 
fortunes are terribly distressing — to conduct everything with 
the strictest privacy and delicacy. In a word, if you and he 
consult his interests, he will accompany me unresistingly ; 
otherwise I must summon legal force. Any opposition will 
only compel a very unseemly encounter of physical force, and 
with it the publicity I am desirous, for the sake of his relatives 
and position, to spare him.” 

A dead silence followed his words, the silence that follows 
on an insult that cannot be averted or avenged; on a thing too 
hideously shameful for the thoughts to grasp it as reality. 

In the first moment of Baroni’s words Cecil’s eyes had 
gleamed again with that dark and desperate flash of a passion 
that would have been worse to face even than his comrade’s 
wrath; it died, however, well-nigh instantly, repressed by a 
marvelous strength of control, whatever its motive. He was 
simply, as he had been throughout, passive — so passive that 
even Ezra Baroni, who knew what the Seraph never dreamed, 
looked at him in wonder, and felt a faint, sickly fear of that 
singular, unbroken calm. It perplexed him — the first thing 
which had ever done so in his own peculiar paths of finesse and 
of intrigue. 

The one placed in ignorance between them, at once as it were 
the judge and champion of his brother-at-arms, felt wild and 
blind under this unutterable shame, which seemed to net them 
both in such close and hopeless meshes. He, heir to one of 
the greatest coronets in the world, must see his friend branded 
as a common felon, and could do no more to aid or to avenge 
him than if he were a charcoal-burner toiling yonder in the 
pine woods ! His words were hoarse and broken as he spoke : 

“ Cecil, tell me — what is to be done ? This infamous out- 
rage cannot pass ! cannot go on ! I will send for the Duke, 
for ” 

“ Send for no one.” 

Bertie’s voice was slightly weaker, like that of a man ex- 
hausted by a long struggle, but it was firm and very quiet. Its 
composure fell on Rockingham’s tempestuous grief and rage 
with a sickly, silencing awe, with a terrible sense of some evil 
here beyond his knowledge and ministering, and of an im- 


150 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


potence alike to act and to serve, to defend and to avenge — 
the deadliest thing his fearless life had ever known. 

“ Pardon me, my lord,” interposed Baroni, “ I can waste time 
no more. You must be now convinced yourself of your friend’s 
implication in this very distressing affair.” 

“ I ! ” The Seraph’s majesty of haughtiest amaze and scorn 
blazed from his azure eyes on the man who dared say this thing 
to him. “ I ! If you dare hint such a damnable shame to my 
face again, I will wring your neck with as little remorse as I 
would a kite’s. I believe in his guilt? Forgive me, Cecil, that 
I can even repeat the word! I believe in it? I would as soon 
believe in my own disgrace — in my father’s dishonor ! ” 

“ How will your lordship account, then, for Mr. Cecil’s total 
inability to tell us how he spent the hours between six and nine 
on the 15th ? ” 

“Unable? He is not unable; he declines! Bertie, tell me 
what you did that one cursed evening? Whatever it was, 
wherever it was, say it for my sake, and shame this devil.” 

Cecil would more willingly have stood a line of leveled rifle- 
tubes aimed at his heart than that passionate entreaty from the 
man he loved best on earth. He staggered slightly, as if he 
were about to fall, and a faint white foam came on his lips; 
but he recovered himself almost instantly. It was so natural 
to him to repress every emotion that it was simply old habit 
to do so now. 

“ I have answered,” he said very low, each word a pang — “ I 
cannot.” 

Baroni waved his hand again with the same polite, significant 
gesture. 

“ In that case, then, there is but one alternative. Will you 
follow me quietly, sir, or must force be employed ? ” 

“ I will go with you.” 

The reply was very tranquil, but in the look that met his own 
as it was given, Baroni saw that some other motive than that 
of any fear was its spring; that some cause beyond the mere 
abhorrence of “ a scene ” was at the root of the quiescence. 

“ It must be so,” said Cecil huskily to his friend. “ This man 
is right, so far as he knows. He is only acting on his own con- 
victions. We cannot blame him. The whole is — a mystery, 
an error. But, as it stands, there is no resistance.” 

“ Resistance ! By God ! I would resist if I shot him dead, 
or shot myself. Stay — wait — one moment! If it be an error 


FOR A WOMANS SAKE. 151 

in the sense you mean, it must be a forgery of your name as of 
mine. You think that ? ” 

“ I did not say so.” 

The Seraph gave him a rapid, shuddering glance; for once 
the suspicion crept in on him — was this guilt? Yet even now 
the doubt would not be harbored by him. 

“ Say so — you must mean so ! You deny them as yours; what 
can they be but forgeries? There is no other explanation. I 
think the whole matter a conspiracy to extort money ; but I may 
be wrong — let that pass. If it be, on the contrary, an imitation 
of both our signatures that has been palmed off upon these 
usurers, it is open to other treatment. Compensated for their 
pecuniary loss, they can have no need to press the matter fur- 
ther, unless they find out the delinquent. See here ” — he went 
to a writing-cabinet at the end of the room, flung the lid back, 
swept out a heap of papers, and wrenching a blank check from 
its book, threw it down before Baroni — “ here ! fill it up as you 
like, and I will sign it in exchange for the forged sheet.” 

Baroni paused a moment. Money he loved with an adoration 
that excluded every other passion ; that blank check, that limit- 
less carte blanche, that vast exchequer from which to draw ! — it 
was a sore temptation. He thought wistfully of the welsher’s 
peremptory forbiddance of all compromise — of the welsher’s in- 
exorable command to “ wring the fine-feathered bird,” lose 
whatever might be lost by it. 

Cecil, ere the Hebrew could speak, leaned forward, took the 
check and tore it in two. 

“God bless you, Bock,” he said, so low that it only reached 
the Seraph’s ear, “ but you must not do that.” 

“ Beauty, are you mad ? ” cried the Marquis passionately. 
“If this villainous thing be a forgery, you are its victim as 
much as I — tenfold more than I. If this Jew choose to sell 
the paper to me, naming his own compensation, whose affair 
is it except his and mine ? They have been losers, we indemnify 
them. It rests with us to find out the criminal. M. Baroni, 
there are a hundred more checks in that book; name your price, 
and you shall have it ; or, if you prefer my father’s, I will send 
to him for it. His Grace will sign one without a question of its 
errand, if I ask him. Come ! your price ? ” 

Baroni had recovered the momentary temptation, and was 
strong in the austerity of virtue, in the unassailability of so- 
cial duty. 


152 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ You behave most nobly, most generously by your friend, 
my lord,” he said politely. “ I am glad such friendship exists 
on earth. But you really ask me what is not in my power. In 
the first place, I am but one of the firm, and have no authority 
to act alone; in the second, I most certainly, were I alone, 
should decline totally any pecuniary compromise. A great 
criminal action is not to be hushed up by any monetary ar- 
rangement. You, my Lord Marquis, may be ignorant in the 
Guards of a very coarse term used in law, called i compound- 
ing a felony.’ That is what you tempt me to now.” 

The Seraph, with one of those oaths that made the Hebrew’s 
blood run cold, though he was no coward, opened his lips to 
speak ; Cecil arrested him with that singular impassiveness, that 
apathy of resignation which had characterized his whole con- 
duct throughout, save at a few brief moments. 

“ Make no opposition. The man is acting but in his own 
justification. I will wait for mine. To resist would be to 
degrade us with a bully’s brawl; they have the law with them. 
Let it take its course.” 

The Seraph dashed his hand across his eyes; he felt blind — 
the room seemed to reel with him. 

“ Oh, God ! that you ” 

He could not finish the words. That his comrade, his friend, 
one of his own corps, of his own world, should be arrested like 
the blackest thief in Whitechapel or in the Rue du Temple ! 

Cecil glanced at him, and his eyes grew infinitely yearning — 
infinitely gentle; a shudder shook him all through his limbs. 
He hesitated a moment; then he stretched out his hand. 

“ Will you take it — still? ” 

Almost before the words were spoken, his hand was held in 
both of the Seraph’s. 

“ Take it? Before all the world — always, come what will.” 

His eyes were dim as he spoke, and his rich voice rang clear 
as the ring of silver, though there was the tremor of emotion 
in it. He had forgotten the Hebrew’s presence; he had for- 
- gotten all save his friend and his friend’s extremity. Cecil did 
not answer; if he had done so, all the courage, all the calm, all 
the control that pride and breeding alike sustained in him, 
would have been shattered down to weakness; his hand closed 
fast in his companion’s, his eyes met his once in a look of grati- 
tude that pierced the heart of the other like a knife; then he 
turned to the Jew with a haughty serenity. 


FOR A WOMAN’S SAKE. 


153 


“ M. Baroni, I am ready.” 

“Wait!” cried Rockingham. “Where you go I come.” 

The Hebrew interposed demurely. 

“Forgive me, my lord — not now. You can take what steps 
you will as regards your friend later on; and you may rest 
assured he will be treated with all delicacy compatible with 
the case, but you cannot accompany him now. I rely on his 
word to go with me quietly; but I now regard him, and you 
must remember this, as not the son of Viscount Royallieu — not 
the Honorable Bertie Cecil, of the Life Guards — not the friend 
of one so distinguished as yourself — but as simply an arrested 
forger.” 

Baroni could not deny himself that last sting of his ven- 
geance; yet, as he saw the faces of the men on whom he flung 
the insult, he felt for the moment that he might pay for his 
temerity with his life. He put his hand above his eyes with a 
quick, involuntary movement, like a man who wards off a blow. 

“ Gentlemen,” and his teeth chattered as he spoke, “ one sign 
of violence, and I shall summon legal force.” 

Cecil caught the Seraph’s lifted arm, and stayed it in its 
vengeance. His own teeth were clinched tight as a vise, and over 
the haggard whiteness of his face a deep red flush had come. 

“We degrade ourselves by resistance. Let me go — they must 
do what they will. My reckoning must wait, and my justifica- 
tion. One word only. Take the King and keep him for my sake.” 

Another moment, and the door had closed; he was gone out 
to his fate, and the Seraph, with no eyes on him, bowed down 
his head upon his arms where he leaned against the marble 
table, and, for the first time in all his life, felt the hot tears 
roll down his face like rain, as the passion of a woman mastered 
and unmanned him — he would sooner a thousand times have laid 
his friend down in his grave than have seen him live for this. 

Cecil went slowly out beside his accuser. The keen, bright 
eyes of the Jew kept vigilant watch and ward on him; a single 
sign of any effort to evade him would have been arrested by him 
in an instant with preconcerted skill. He looked, and saw that 
no thought of escape was in his prisoner’s mind. Cecil had sur- 
rendered himself, and he went to his doom; he laid no blame 
on Baroni, and he scarce gave him a remembrance. The He- 
brew did not stand to him in the colors he wore to Rocking- 
ham, who beheld this thing but on its surface. Baroni was to 
him only the agent of an inevitable shame, of a hapless fate 


154 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


that closed him in, netting him tight with the web of his own 
past actions; no more than the irresponsible executioner of 
what was in the Jew’s sight and knowledge a just sentence. 
He condemned his accuser in nothing; no more than the con- 
science of a guilty man can condemn the discoverers and the 
instruments of his chastisement. 

Was he guilty? 

Any judge might have said that he knew himself to be so 
as he passed down the staircase and outward to the entrance 
with that dead resignation on his face, that brooding, rigid 
look set on his features, and gazing almost in stupefaction out 
from the dark hazel depths of eyes that women had loved for 
their luster, their languor, and the softness of their smile. 

They walked out into the evening air unnoticed; he had 
given his consent to follow the bill-discounter without resist- 
ance, and he had no thought to break his word; he had sub- 
mitted himself to the inevitable course of this fate that had 
fallen on him, and the whole tone of his temper and his breed- 
ing lent him the quiescence, though he had none of the doc- 
trine of a supreme fatalist. There were carriages standing be- 
fore the hotel, waiting for those who were going to the ball- 
room, to the theater, to an archduke’s dinner, to a princess’ 
entertainment; he looked at them with a vague, strange sense 
of unreality — these things of the life from which he was now 
barred out forever. The sparkling tide of existence in Baden 
was flowing on its way, and he went out an accused felon, 
branded, and outlawed, and dishonored from all place in the 
world that he had led, and been caressed by and beguiled with 
for so long. 

To-night, at this hour, he should have been among all that 
was highest and gayest and fairest in Europe at the banquet 
of a Prince — and he went by his captor’s side, a convicted 
criminal. 

Once out in the air, the Hebrew laid his hand on his arm. 
He started — it was the first sign that his liberty was gone ! He 
restrained himself from all resistance still, and passed onward, 
down where Baroni motioned him out of the noise of the car- 
riages, out of the glare of the light, into the narrow, darkened 
turning of a side street. He went passively; for this man 
trusted to his honor. 

In the gloom stood three figures, looming indistinctly in the 
shadow of the houses. One was a Huissier of the Staats- 


FOR A WOMAN’S SAKE. 


155 


Procurator, beside whom stood the Commissary of Police of 
the district; the third was an English detective. Ere he saw 
them their hands were on his shoulders, and the cold chill of 
steel touched his wrists. The Hebrew had betrayed him, and 
arrested him in the open street. In an instant, as the ring of 
the rifle rouses the slumbering tiger, all the life and the soul 
that were in him rose in revolt as the icy glide of the handcuffs 
sought their hold on his arms. In an instant, all the wild 
blood of his race, all the pride of his breeding, all the honor 
of his service, flashed into fire and leaped into action. Trusted, 
he would have been true to his accuser; deceived, the chains of 
his promise were loosened, and all he thought, all he felt, all he 
knew were the lion impulses, the knightly instincts, the resolute 
choice to lose life rather than to lose freedom, of a soldier and 
a gentleman. All he remembered was that he would fight to 
the death rather than be taken alive; that they should kill him 
where he stood, in the starlight, rather than lead him in the 
sight of men 1 as a felon. 

With the strength that lay beneath all the gentle languor 
of his habits and with the science of the Eton Playing Fields 
of his boyhood, he wrenched his wrists free ere the steel had 
closed, and with the single straightening of his left arm felled 
the detective to earth like a bullock, with a crashing blow that 
sounded through the stillness like some heavy timber stove in; 
flinging himself like lightning on the Hussier, he twisted out of 
his grasp the metal weight of the handcuffs, and wrestling with 
him was woven for a second in that close-knit struggle which 
is only seen when the wrestlers wrestle for life and death. The 
German was a powerful and firmly built man; but Cecil’s 
science was the finer and the most masterly. His long, slender, 
delicate limbs seemed to twine and writhe around the massive 
form of his antagonist like the coils of a cobra; they rocked 
and swayed to and fro on the stones, while the shrill, shriek- 
ing voice of Baroni filled the night with its clamor. The vise- 
like pressure of the stalwart arms of his opponent crushed him 
in till his ribs seemed to bend and break under the breathless 
oppression, the iron force; but desperation nerved him, the 
Royallieu blood, that never took defeat, was roused now, for 
the first time in his careless life; his skill and his nerve were 
unrivaled, and with a last effort he dashed the Huissier off 
him, and lifting him up — he never knew how — as he would have 
lifted a log of wood, hurled him down in the white streak of 


156 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


moonlight that alone slanted through the peaked roofs of the 
crooked by-street. 

The cries of Baroni had already been heard; a crowd, drawn 
by their shrieking appeals, were bearing toward the place in 
tumult. The Jew had the quick wit to give them, as call-word, 
that it was a croupier who had been found cheating and fled; 
it sufficed to inflame the whole mob against the fugitive. Cecil 
looked round him once — such a glance as a Royal gives when 
the gaze-hounds are panting about him and the fangs are in 
his throat ; then, with the swiftness of the deer itself, he dashed 
downward into the gloom of the winding passage at the speed 
which had carried him, in many a foot-race, victor in the old 
green Eton meadows. There was scarce a man in the Queen’s 
Service who could rival him for lightness of limb, for power of 
endurance in every sport of field and fell, of the moor and the 
gymnasium; and the athletic pleasures of many a happy hour 
stood him in good stead now, in the emergence of his terrible 
extremity. 

Flight! — for the instant the word thrilled through him with 
a loathing sense. Flight! — the craven’s refuge, the criminal’s 
resource. He wished in the moment’s agony that they would 
send a bullet through his brain as he ran, rather than drive 
him out to this. Flight! — he felt a coward and a felon as he 
fled; fled from every fairer thing, from every peaceful hour, 
from the friendship and good will of men, from the fame of 
his ancient race, from the smile of the women that loved him, 
from all that makes life rich and fair, from all that men call 
honor; fled, to leave his name disgraced in the service he 
adored; fled, to leave the world to think him a guilty dastard 
who dared not face his trial; fled, to bid his closest friend be- 
lieve him low sunk in the depths of foulest felony, branded 
forever with a criminal’s shame — by his own act, by his own 
hand. Flight! — it has bitter pangs that make brave men feel 
cowards when they fly from tyranny and danger and death to 
a land of peace and promise; but in his flight he left behind 
him all that made life worth the living, and went out to meet 
eternal misery; renouncing every hope, yielding up all his 
future. 

“ It is for her sake — and his,” he thought ; and without a 
moment’s pause, without a backward look, he ran, as the stag 
runs with the bay of the pack behind it, down into the shadows 
of the night. 


FOR A woman’s sake. 157 

The hue and cry was after him; the tumult of a crowd’s ex- 
citement, raised it knows not why or wherefore, was on his 
steps, joined with the steadier and keener pursuit of men 
organized for the hunter’s work, and trained to follow the 
faintest track, the slightest clew. The moon was out, and they 
saw him clearly, though the marvelous fleetness of his stride 
had borne him far ahead in the few moments’ start he had 
gained. He heard the beat of their many feet on the stones, 
the dull thud of their running, the loud clamor of the mob, 
the shrill cries of the Hebrew offering gold with frantic lavish- 
ness to whoever should stop his prey. All the breathless excita- 
tion, all the keen and desperate straining, all the tension of 
the neck-and-neck struggle that he had known so often over the 
brown autumn country of the Shires at home, he knew now, 
intensified to horror, made deadly with despair, changed into 
a race for life and death. 

Yet, with it the wild blood in him woke; the recklessness 
of peril, the daring and defiant courage that lay beneath his 
levity and languor heated his veins and spurred his strength; 
he was ready to die if they chose to slaughter him; but for his 
freedom he strove as men will strive for life ; to distance them, 
to escape them, he would have breathed his last at the goal; 
they might fire him down, if they would, but he swore in his 
teeth to die free. 

Some Germans in his path, hearing the shouts that thun- 
dered after him in the night, drew their mule-cart across the 
pent-up passage-way down which he turned, and blocked the 
narrow road. He saw it in time; a second later, and it would 
have been instant death to him at the pace he went; he saw it, 
and gathered all the force and nervous impetus in his frame 
to the trial, as he came rushing downward along the slope of 
the lane, with his elbows back, and his body straight, as prize- 
runners run. The wagon, sideways, stretched across — a solid 
barrier, heaped up with fir boughs brought for firing from the 
forests; the mules stood abreast, yoked together. The mob fol- 
lowing saw too, and gave a hoot and yell of brutal triumph; 
their prey was in their clutches; the cart barred his progress, 
and he must double like a fox faced with a stone wall. 

Scarcely! — they did not know the man with whom they had 
to deal — the daring and the coolness that the languid surface of 
indolent fashion had covered. Even in the imminence of su- 
preme peril, of breathless jeopardy, he measured with unerr- 


158 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


ing eye the distance and the need; rose as lightly in the air as 
Forest King had risen with him over fence and hedge; and with 
a single, running leap cleared the width of the mules’ backs, and 
landing safely on the farther side, dashed on; scarcely pausing 
for breath. The yell that hissed in his wake, as the throng saw 
him escape, by what to their slow Teutonic instincts seemed 
a devil’s miracle, was on his ear like the bay of the slot-hounds 
to the deer. They might kill him, if they could ; but they should 
never take him captive. 

And the moon was so brightly, so pitilessly clear; shining 
down in the summer light, as though in love with the beauty 
of earth! He looked up once; the stars seemed reeling round 
him in disordered riot; the chill face of the moon looked un- 
pitying as death. All this loveliness was round him; this glory 
of sailing cloud and shadowy forest and tranquil planet, and 
there was no help for him. 

A gay burst of music broke on the stillness from the distance ; 
he had left the brilliance of the towfl behind him, and was 
now in its by-streets and outskirts. The sound seemed to thrill 
him to the bone; it was like the echo of the lost life he was 
leaving forever. 

He saw, he felt, he heard, he thought ; feeling and sense were 
quickened in him as they had never been before, yet he never 
slackened his pace save once or twice, when he paused for 
breath; he ran as swiftly, he ran as keenly, as ever stag or fox 
had run before him; doubling with their skill, taking the 
shadow as they took the covert ; noting with their rapid eye the 
safest track; outracing with their rapid speed the pursuit that, 
thundered in his wake. 

The by-lanes he took were deserted, and he was now well-nigh 
out of the town, with the open country and forest lying before 
him. The people whom he met rushed out of his path ; happily 
for him they were few, and were terrified, because they thought 
him a madman broken loose from his keepers. He never looked 
back; but he could tell that the pursuit was falling farther and 
farther behind him ; that the speed at which he went was break- 
ing the powers of his hunters; fresh throngs added indeed to 
the first pursuers as they tore down through the starlit night, 
but none had the science with which he went, the trained, 
matchless skill of the university foot-race. He left them more 
and more behind him each second of the breathless chase, that, 
endless as it seemed, had lasted bare three minutes. If the 


FOR A WOMAN’S SAKE. 


159 


night were but dark! He felt that pitiless luminance glisten- 
ing bright about him everywhere; shining over all the summer 
world, and leaving scarce a shadow to fall athwart his way. 
The silver glory of the radiance was shed on every rood of 
ground; one hour of a winter night, one hour of the sweeping 
ink-black rain of an autumn storm, and he could have made 
for shelter as the stag makes for it across the broad, brown 
Highland water. 

Before him stretched indeed the gloom of the masses of pine, 
the upward slopes of tree-stocked hills, the vastness of the 
Black Forest; but they were like the mirage to a man who 
dies in a desert; he knew, at the pace he went, he could not 
live to reach them. The blood was beating in his brain and 
pumping from his heart; a tightness like an iron band seemed 
girt about his loins, his lips began to draw his breath in with 
loud gasping spasms; he knew that in a little space his speed 
must slacken — he knew it by the roar, like the noise of waters, 
that was rushing on his ear, and the oppression, like a hand’s 
hard grip, that seemed above his heart. 

But he would go till he died; go till they fired on him; go, 
though the skies felt swirling round like a sea of fire, and the 
hard, hot earth beneath his feet jarred his whole frame as his 
feet struck it flying. 

The angle of an old wood house, with towering roof and high- 
peaked gables, threw a depth of shadow at last across his road; 
a shadow black and rayless, darker for the white glisten of the 
moon around. Built more in the Swiss than the German style, 
a massive balcony of wood ran round it, upon and beneath which 
in its heavy shade was an impenetrable gloom, while the twisted 
wooden pillars ran upward to the gallery, loggia-like. With 
rapid perception and intuition he divined rather than saw these 
things, and, swinging himself up with noiseless lightness, he 
threw himself full-length down on the rough flooring of the 
balcony. If they passed he was safe, for a brief time more at 
least; if they found him — his teeth clinched like a mastiff’s 
where he lay — he had the strength in him still to sell his life 
dearly. 

The pursuers came closer and closer, and by the clamors that 
floated up in indistinct and broken fragments, he knew that they 
had tracked him. He heard the tramp of their feet as they 
came under the loggia; he heard the click of the pistols — they 
were close upon him at last in the blackness of night. 


CHAPTEK XII. 


THE KING'S LAST SERVICE. 

“ Is he up there ? ” asked a voice in the darkness. 

“Hot likely. A cat couldn’t scramble up that woodwork," 
answered a second. 

“ Send a shot, and try,” suggested a third. 

There he lay, stretched motionless on the flat roof of the 
veranda. He heard the words as the thronging mob surged, and 
trampled, and swore, and quarreled, beneath him, in the black- 
ness of the gloom; balked of their prey, and savage for some 
amends. There was a moment’s pause — a hurried, eager con- 
sultation ; then he heard the well-known sound of a charge being 
rammed down, and the sharp drawing out of a ramrod; there; 
was a flash, a report, a line of light flamed a second in his 
sight; a ball hissed past him with a loud, singing rush, and 
bedded itself in the timber, a few inches above his uncovered 
hair. A dead silence followed; then the muttering of many 
voices broke out afresh. 

“ He’s not there, at any rate,” said one, who seemed the chief ;. 
“ he couldn’t have kept as still as that with a shot so near him. 
He’s made for the open country and the forest, I’ll take my 
oath.” 

Then the treading of many feet trampled their way out from 
beneath the loggia; their voices and their rapid steps grew 
fainter and fainter as they hurried away through the night. 
Eor a while, at least, he was safe. 

For some moments he lay prostrated there; the rushing of 
the blood on his brain, the beating of his heart, the panting 
of his breath, the quivering of his limbs after the intense 
muscular effort he had gone through, mastered him and flung 
him down there, beaten and powerless. He felt the foam on 
his lips, and he thought with every instant that the surcharged 
veins would burst; hands of steel seemed to crush in upon his 
chest, knotted cords to tighten in excruciating pain about his 
2oins; he breathed, in short, convulsive gasps; his eyes were 
blind, and his head swam. A dreaming fancy that this was 
death vaguely came on him, and he was glad it should be so. 

160 


THE KING’S LAST SERVICE. 161 

• 

His eyelids closed unconsciously, weighed down as by the 
weight of lead ; he saw the starry skies above him no more, and 
the distant noise of the pursuit waxed duller and duller on his 
ear; then he lost all sense and memory — he ceased even to feel 
the night air on his face. How long he lay there he never 
knew; when consciousness returned to him all was still; the 
moon was shining down clear as the day, the west wind was 
blowing softly among his hair. He staggered to his feet and 
leaned against the timber of the upper wall; the shelving, im- 
penetrable darkness sloped below; above were the glories of a 
summer sky at midnight, around him the hills and woods were 
bathed in the silver light ; he looked, and he remembered all. 

He had escaped his captors; but for how long? While yet 
there were some hours of the night left, he must find some surer 
refuge, or fall into their hands again. Yet it was strange that 
in this moment his own misery and his own peril were less upon 
him than a longing to see once more — and for the last time — 
the woman for whose sake he suffered this. Their love had had 
the lightness and the languor of their world, and had had but 
little depth in it; yet, in that hour of his supreme sacrifice to 
her, he loved her as. he had not loved in his life. 

Recklessness had always been latent in him, with all his 
serenity and impassiveness; a reckless resolve entered him now 
— reckless to madness. Lightly and cautiously, though his 
sinews still ached, and his nerves still throbbed with the past 
strain, he let himself fall, hand over hand, as men go down 
a rope, along the woodwork to the ground. Once touching earth, 
off he glided, swiftly and noiselessly, keeping in the shadow 
of the walls all the length of the streets he took, and shunning 
every place where any sort of tumult could suggest the neigh- 
borhood of those who were out and hunting him down. As it 
chanced, they had taken to the open country; he passed on un- 
questioned, and wound his way to the Kursaal. He remem- 
bered that to-night there was a masked ball, at which all the 
princely and titled world of Baden were present; to which he 
would himself have gone after the Russian dinner; by the look 
of the stars he saw that it must be midnight or past; the ball 
would be now at its height. 

The dare-devil wildness and the cool quietude that were so 
intimately and intricately mingled in his nature could alone 
have prompted and projected such a thought and such an action 
as suggested themselves to him now; in the moment of his 


162 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


direst extremity, of his utter hopelessness, of his most imminent 
peril, he went — to take a last look at his mistress ! Baden, for 
aught he knew, might be but one vast network to mesh in and 
to capture him; yet he ran the risk with the dauntless temerity 
that had ever lain underneath the indifferentism and the indo- 
lence of his habits. 

Keeping always in the shadow, and moving slowly, so as to 
attract no notice from those he passed, he made his way de- 
liberately, straight toward the blaze of light where all the gayety 
of the town was centered; he reckoned, and rightly, as it proved, 
that the rumor of his story, the noise of his pursuit, would 
not have penetrated here as yet; his own world would be still 
in ignorance. A moment, that was all he wanted, just to look 
upon a woman’s beauty; he went forward daringly and tran- 
quilly to the venture. If any had told him that a vein of 
romance was in him, he would have stared and thought them 
madmen ; yet something almost as wild was in his instinct now. 
He had lost so much to keep her honor from attainder; he 
wished to meet the gaze of her fair eyes once more before he 
went out to his exile. 

In one of the string of waiting carriages he saw a loose 
domino lying on the seat ; he knew the liveries and the footmen, 
and he signed them to open the door. “ Tell Count Carl I have 
borrowed these,” he said to the servant, as he sprang into the 
vehicle, slipped the scarlet-and-black domino on, took the mask, 
and left the carriage. The man touched his hat and said noth- 
ing; he knew Cecil well, as an intimate friend of his young 
Austrian master. In that masquerade guise he was safe; for 
the few minutes, at least, which were all he dared take. 

He went on, mingled among the glittering throng, and pierced 
his way to the ballroom, the Venetian mask covering his fea- 
tures; many spoke to him; by the scarlet-and-black colors they 
took him for the Austrian; he answered none, and treaded his 
way among the blaze of hues, the joyous echoes of the music, the 
flatter of the silk and satin dominoes, the mischievous chal- 
lenge of whispers. His eyes sought only one; he soon saw her, 
in the white and silver mask-dress, with the spray of carmine- 
hued eastern flowers, by which he had been told, days ago, to 
recognize her. A crowd of dominoes were about her, some 
masked, some not. Her eyes glanced through the envious dis- 
guise, and her lips were laughing. He approached her with all 
his old tact in the art d’arborer le cotillon; not hurriedly, so 


THE KING’S LAST SERVICE. 163 

as to attract notice, but carefully, so as to glide into a place 
near her. 

“ You promised me this waltz,” he said very gently in her ear. 
“ I have come in time for it.” 

She recognized him by his voice, and turned from a French 
prince to rebuke him for his truancy, with gay raillery and 
mock anger. 

“ F orgive me, and let me have this one waltz — please do ! ” 
She glanced at him a moment, and let him lead her out. 

“No one has my step as you have it, Bertie,” she murmured, 
as they glided into the measure of the dance. 

She thought his glance fell sadly on her as he smiled. 

“No? — but others will soon learn it.” 

Yet he had never treaded more deftly the maze of the waltzers, 
never trodden most softly, more swiftly, or with more science, 
the polished floor. The waltz was perfect; she did not know 
it was also a farewell. The delicate perfume of her floating 
dress, the gleam of the scarlet flower-spray, the flash of the 
diamonds studding her domino, the fragrance of her lips as they 
breathed so near his own ; they haunted him many a long year 
afterward. 

His voice was very calm, his smile was very gentle, his step, 
as he swung easily through the intricacies of the circle, was 
none the less smooth and sure for the race that had so late 
strained his sinews to bursting; the woman he loved saw no 
change in him; but as the waltz drew to its end, she felt his 
heart beat louder and quicker on her own; she felt his hand 
hold her own more closely, she felt his head drooped over her 
till his lips almost touched her brow; — it was his last embrace; 
no other could be given here, in the multitude of these courtly 
crowds. Then, with a few low-murmured words that thrilled 
her in their utterance, and echoed in her memory for years to 
come, he resigned her to the Austrian Grand Duke who was 
her next claimant, and left her silently — forever. 

Less heroism has often proclaimed itself, with blatant trumpet 
to the world — a martyrdom. 

He looked back once as he passed from the ballroom — back 
to the sea of colors, to the glitter of light, to the moving hues, 
amid which the sound of the laughing, intoxicating music 
seemed to float; to the glisten of the jewels and the gold and 
the silver — to the scene, in a word, of the life that would be his 
no more. He looked back in a long, lingering look, such as 


164 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


a man may give the gladness of the earth before the gates of 
a prison close on him; then he went out once more into the 
night, threw the domino and the mask back again into the car- 
riage, and took his way, alone. 

He passed along till he had gained the shadow of a by-street, 
by a sheer unconscious instinct; then he paused, and looked 
round him — what could he do? He wondered vaguely if he 
were not dreaming; the air seemed to reel about him, and the 
earth to rock; the very force of control he had sustained made 
the reaction stronger; he began to feel blind and stupefied. 
How could he escape? The railway station would be guarded 
by those on the watch for him ; he had but a few pounds in his 
pocket, hastily slipped in as he had won them, “ money-down,” 
at ecarte that day; all avenues of escape were closed to him, 
and he knew that his limbs would refuse to carry him with any 
kind of speed farther. He had only the short, precious hours 
remaining of the night in which to make good his flight — and 
flight he must take to save those for whom he had elected to 
sacrifice his life. Yet how? and where? 

A hurried, noiseless footfall came after him; Rake’s voice 
came breathless on his ear, while the man’s hand went up in 
the unforgotten soldier’s salute — 

“ Sir! no words. Follow me, and I’ll save you.” 

The one well-known voice was to him like water in a desert 
land; he would have trusted the speaker’s fidelity with his life. 
He asked nothing, said nothing, but followed rapidly and in 
silence; turning and doubling down a score of crooked pas- 
sages, and burrowing at the last like a mole in a still, deserted 
place on the outskirts of the town, where some close-set trees 
grew at the back of stables and out-buildings. 

In a streak of the white moonlight stood two hunters, sad- 
dled; one was Forest King. With a cry, Cecil threw his arms 
round the animal’s neck ; he had no thought then except that he 
and the horse must part. 

“ Into saddle, sir ! quick as your life ! ” whispered Rake. 
“ We’ll be far away from this d d den by morning.” 

Cecil looked at him like a man in stupor — his arm still over 
the gray’s neck. 

“He can have no stay in him! He was dead-beat on the 
course.” 

“ I know he was, sir ; but he aint now ; he was pisined ; but 
I’ve a trick with a ’oss that ’ll set that sort o’ thing — if it aint 


THE KING’S LAST SERVICE. 165 

gone too far, that is to say — right in a brace of shakes. I doc- 
tored him ; he’s hisself agen ; he’ll take you till he drops.” 

The King thrust his noble head closer in his master’s bosom, 
and made a little murmuring noise, as though he said, “ Try 
me ! ” 

“ God bless you, Rake ! ” Cecil said huskily. “ But I cannot 
take him; he will starve with me. And — how did you know of 
this?” 

“ Beggin’ your pardon, your honor, he’ll eat chopped furze 
with you better than he’ll eat oats and hay along of a new 
master,” returned Rake rapidly , tightening the girths. “ I 
don’t know nothin’, sir, save that I heard you was in a strait; 
I don’t want to know nothin’; but I sees them cursed cads 
a-runnin’. of you to earth, and thinks I to myself, ‘ Come what 
will, the King will be the ticket for him.’ So I ran to your 
room unbeknown, packed a little valise, and got out the pass- 
ports; then back again to the stables, and saddled him like 
lightnin’, and got ’em off — nobody knowing but Bill there. I 
seed you go by into the Kursaal, and laid in wait for you, sir. 
I made bold to bring Mother o’ Pearl for myself.” 

And Rake stopped, breathless and hoarse with passion and 
grief that he would not utter. He had heard more than he said. 

“ F or yourself ? ” echoed Cecil. “ What do you mean ? My 
good fellow, I am ruined. I shall be beggared from to-night — 
utterly. I cannot even help you or keep you; but Lord Rock- 
ingham will do both for my sake.” 

The ci-devant soldier struck his heel into the earth with a 
fiery oath. 

“ Sir, there aint time for no words. Where you goes I go. 
I’ll follow you while there’s a drop o’ blood in me. You was 
good to me when I was a poor devil that everyone scouted; you 
shall have me with you to the last, if I die for it. There ! ” 

Cecil’s voice shook as he answered. The fidelity touched him 
as adversity could not do. 

“ Rake, you are a noble fellow. I would take you, were it 
possible; but — in an hour I may be in a felon’s prison. If I 
escape that, I shall lead a life of such wretchedness as ” 

“ That’s not nothing to me, sir.” 

“ But it is much to me,” answered Cecil. “ As things have 
turned — life is over with me. Rake. What my own fate may 
be I have not the faintest notion — but let it be what it will, 
it must be a bitter one. I will not drag another into it.” 


166 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“If you send me away, I’ll shoot myself through the head, 
sir; that’s all.” 

“ You will do nothing of the kind. Go to Lord Rockingham, 
and ask him from me to take you into his service. You can- 
not have a kinder master.” 

“ I don’t say nothing agen the Marquis, sir,” said Rake dog- 
gedly ; “ he’s a right-on generous gentleman, but he aren’t you. 
Let me go with you, if it’s just to rub the King down. Lord, 
sir! you don’t know what straits I’ve lived in — what a lot of 
things I can turn my hand to — what a one I am to fit myself 
into any rat-hole, and make it spicy. Why, sir; I’m that born 
scamp, I am — I’m a deal happier on the cross and getting my 
bread just anyhow, than I am when I’m in clover like you’ve 
kep’ me.” 

Rake’s eyes looked up wistfully and eager as a dog’s when 
he prays to be let out of kennel to follow the gun; his voice 
was husky and agitated with a strong excitement. Cecil stood 
a moment, irresolute, touched and pained at the man’s spaniel- 
like affection — yet not yielding to it. 

“ I thank you from my heart, Rake,” he said at length, “ but 
it must not be. I tell you my future life will be beggary ” 

“ You’ll want me anyways, sir,” retorted Rake, ashamed of 
the choking in his throat. “ I ask your pardon for interruptin’, 
but every second’s that precious like. Besides, sir, I’ve got to 
cut and run for my own sake. I’ve laid Willon’s head open, 
down there in the loose box.; and when he’s come to himself 
a pretty hue and cry he’ll raise after me. He painted the King, 
that’s what he did; and I told him so, and I gev’ it to him — one 
— two — amazin’ ! Get into saddle, sir, for the Lord’s sake ! and 
here. Bill — you run back, shut the door, and don’t let nobody 
know the ’osses are out till the mornin’. Then look like a muff 
as you are, and say nothin’ ! ” 

The stable-boy stared, nodded assent, and sloped off. Rake 
threw himself across the brown mare. 

“Now, sir! a steeple-chase for our lives! We’ll be leagues 
away by the day-dawn, and I’ve got their feed in the saddle- 
bags, so that they’ll bait in the forests. Off, sir, for God’s sake, 
or the blackguards will be down on you again ! ” 

As he spoke the clamor and tread of men of the town racing 
to the chase were wafted to them on the night wind, drawing 
nearer and nearer; Rake drew the reins tight in his hand in 
fury. 


THE KING’S LAST SERVICE. 


167 

“ There they come — the d d beaks ! For the love of 

mercy, sir, don’t check now. Ten seconds more and they’ll be on 
you ; off, off ! — or by the Lord Harry, sir, you’ll make a murderer 
of me, and I’ll kill the first man that lays his hand on you ! ” 

The blaze of bitter blood was in the ex-Dragoon’s fiery face 
as the moon shone on it, and he drew out one of his holster 
pistols, and swung round in his saddle, facing the narrow en- 
trance of the lane; ready to shoot down the first of the pursuit 
whose shadow should darken the broad stream of white light 
that fell through the archway. 

Cecil looked at him, and paused no more; but vaulted into 
the old familiar seat, and Forest King bore him away through 
the starry night, with the brown mare racing her best by his 
side. Away — through the sleeping shadows, through the broad 
beams of the moon, through the odorous scent of the crowded 
pines, through the soft breaking gray of the dawn; away — to 
mountain solitudes and forest silence, and the shelter of lonely 
untracked ravines, and the woodland lairs they must share with 
wolf and boar; away — to flee with the flight of the hunted fox, 
to race with the wakeful dread of the deer; away — to what 
fate, who could tell? 

Far and fast they rode through the night, never drawing 
rein. The horses laid well to their work; their youth and their 
mettle were roused, and they needed no touch of spur, but neck- 
and-neck dashed down through the sullen gray of the dawn and 
the breaking flush of the first sunrise. On the hard, parched 
earth, on the dew-laden moss, on the stretches of wayside sward, 
on the dry white dust of the ducal roads, their hoofs thundered, 
unfollowed, unechoed ; the challenge of no pursuit stayed them, 
and they obeyed the call that was made on their strength with 
good and gallant willingness. Far and fast they rode, happily 
knowing the country well; now through the darkness of night, 
now through the glimmering daybreak. Tall walls of fir- 
crowned rocks passed by them like a dream; beetling cliffs and 
summer foliage swept past their eyes, all fused and dim; gray 
piles of monastic buildings, with the dull chimes tolling the 
hour, flashed on their sight to be lost in a moment; corn-lands 
yellowing for the sickle, fields with the sheaves set-up, 
orchards ruddy with fruit, and black barn-roofs lost in leafy 
nests ; villages lying among their hills like German toys caught 
in the hollow of a guarding hand; masses of forests stretching 
wide, somber and silent and dark as a tomb ; the shine of water’s 


168 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


silvery line where it flowed in a rocky channel — they passed 
them all in the soft gray of the waning night, in the white veil 
of the fragrant mists, in the stillness of sleep and of peace. 
Passed them, racing for more than life, flying with the speed 
of the wind. 

“ I failed him to-day through my foes and his,” Forest King 
thought, as he laid his length out in his mighty stride. “ But 
I love him well; I will save him to-night.” And save him the 
brave brute did. The grass was so sweet and so short, he longed 
to stop for a mouthful ; the brooks looked so clear and so brown, 
he longed to pause for a drink; renewed force and reviving 
youth filled his loyal veins with their fire ; he could have thrown 
himself down on that mossy turf, and had a roll in its thyme 
and its lichens for sheer joy that his strength had come back. 
But he would yield to none of these longings; he held on for 
his master’s sake, and tried to think, as he ran, that this was 
only a piece of play — only a steeple-chase, for a silver vase and 
a lady’s smile, such as he and his rider had so often run for, 
and so often won, in those glad hours of the crisp winter noons 
of English Shires far away. He turned his eyes on the brown 
mare’s, and she turned hers on his; they were good friends in 
the stables at home, and they understood one another now. 
“ If I were what I was yesterday, she wouldn’t run even with 
me,” thought the King; but they were doing good work to- 
gether, and he was too true a knight and too true a gentleman 
to be jealous of Mother o’ Pearl, so they raced neck-and-neck 
through the dawn; with the noisy clatter of water-mill wheels, 
or the distant sound of a woodman’s ax, or the tolling bell of 
a convent clock, the only sound on the air save the beat of the 
flying hoofs. 

Away they went, mile on mile, league on league, till the 
stars faded out in the blaze of the sun, and the tall pines rose 
out of the gloom. Either his pursuers were baffled and dis- 
tanced, or no hue and cry was yet after him; nothing arrested 
them as they swept on, and the silent land lay in the stillness 
of morning ere toil and activity awakened. It was strangely 
still, strangely lonely, and the echo of the gallop seemed to beat 
on the stirless, breathless solitude. As the light broke and grew" 
clearer and clearer, Cecil’s face in it was white as death as he 
galloped through the mists, a hunted man, on whose head a price 
was set; but it was quite calm still, and very resolute — there 
was no “ harking back ” in it. 


THE KING S LAST SERVICE. 


169 


They had raced nigh twenty English miles by the time the 
chimes of a village were striking six o’clock; it was the only 
group of dwellings they had ventured near in their flight; the 
leaded lattices were thrust open with a hasty clang, and 
women’s heads looked out as the iron tramp of the hunters’ feet 
struck fire from the stones. A few cries were raised ; one 
burgher called them to know their errand; they answered noth- 
ing, but traversed the street with lightning speed, gone from 
sight almost ere they were seen. A league farther on was a 
wooded bottom, all dark and silent, with a brook murmuring 
through it under the leafy shade of lilies and the tangle of 
water-plants; there Cecil checked the King and threw himself 
out of saddle. 

“ He is not quite himself yet,” he murmured, as he loosened 
the girths and held back the delicate head from the perilous 
cold of the water to which the horse stretched so eagerly; he 
thought more of Forest King than he thought, even in that 
hour, of himself. He did all that was needed with his own 
hands ; fed him with the corn from the saddle-bags, cooled him 
gently, led him to drink a cautious draught from the bubbling 
little stream, then let him graze and rest under the shade of 
the aromatic pines and the deep bronze leaves of the copper 
beeches ; it was almost dark, so heavy and thickly laced were the 
branches, and exquisitely tranquil in the heart of the hilly 
country, in the peace of the early day, with the rushing of the 
forest brook the sole sound that was heard, and the everlasting 
sighing of the pine-boughs overhead. 

Cecil leaned a while silently against one of the great gnarled 
trunks, and Rake affected to busy himself with the mare ; in his 
heart was a tumult of rage, a volcano of curiosity, a pent-up 
storm of anxious amaze, but he would have let Mother o’ Pearl 
brain him with a kick of her iron plates rather than press a 
single look that should seem like doubt, or seem like insult in 
adversity to his fallen master. 

Cecil’s eyes, drooped and brooding, gazed a long half-hour 
down in silence into the brook bubbling at his feet ; then 
he lifted his head and spoke — with a certain formality and 
command in his voice, as though he gave an order on 
parade. 

“ Rake, listen, and do precisely what I bid you ; neither more 
nor less. The horses cannot accompany me, nor you either; I 
must go henceforth where they would starve, and you would 


170 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


do worse. I do not take the King into suffering, nor you into 
temptation.” 

Rake, who at the tone had fallen unconsciously into the at- 
titude of “ attention,” giving the salute with his old military 
instinct, opened his lips to speak in eager protestation; Cecil 
put up his hand. 

“ I have decided; nothing you can say will alter me. We are 
near a by-station now; if I find none there to prevent me, I 
shall get away by the first train; to hide in these woods is out 
of the question. You will return by easy stages to Baden, and 
take the horses at once to Lord Rockingham. They are his 
now. Tell him my last wish was that he should take you into 
his service; and he will be a better master to you than I have 
ever been. As for the King ” — his lips quivered, and his voice 
shook a little, despite himself — “ he will be safe with him. I 
shall go into some foreign service — Austrian, Russian, Mexican, 
whichever be open to me. I would not risk such a horse as 
mine to be sold, ill-treated, tossed from owner to owner, sent 
in his old age to a knacker’s yard, or killed in a skirmish by 
a cannon-shot. Take both him and the mare back, and go back 
yourself. Believe me, I thank you from my heart for your 
noble offer of fidelity, but accept it I never shall.” 

A dead pause came after his words; Rake stood mute; a curi- 
ous look — half-dogged, half-wounded, but very resolute — had 
come on his face. Cecil thought him pained, and spoke with 
an infinite gentleness: 

“ My good fellow, do not regret it, or fancy I have no grati- 
tude to you. I feel your loyalty deeply, and I know all you 
would willingly suffer for me; but it must not be. The mere 
offer of what you would do has been quite testimony enough 
of your truth and your worth. It is impossible for me to tell 
you what has so suddenly changed my fortunes; it is sufficient 
that for the future I shall be, if I live, what you were — a pri- 
vate soldier in an army that needs a sword. But let my fate 
be what it will, I go to it alone. Spare me more speech, and 
simply obey my last command.” 

Quiet as the words were, there was a resolve in them not 
to be disputed ; an authority not to be rebelled against. Rake 
stared, and looked at him blankly; in this man who spoke to 
him with so subdued but so irresistible a power of command, 
he could scarcely recognize the gay, indolent, indulgent, 
pococurante Guardsman, whose most serious anxiety had been 


THE KING’S LAST SERVICE. 1 71 

the set of a lace tie, the fashion of his hunting dress, or the 
choice of the gold arabesques for his smoking-slippers. 

Rake was silent a moment; then his hand touched his cap 
again. 

“Very well, sir,” and without opposition or entreaty, he 
turned to resaddle the mare. 

Our natures are oddly inconsistent. Cecil would not have 
taken the man into exile, and danger, and temptation, and 
away from comfort and an honest life, for any consideration; 
yet it gave him something of a pang that Rake was so soon 
dissuaded from following him, and so easily convinced of the 
folly of his fidelity. But he had dealt himself a far deadlier 
one when he had resolved to part forever from the King. He 
loved the horse better than he loved anything — fed from his 
hand in foalhood, reared, broken, and trained under his own 
eye and his own care, he had had a truer welcome from those 
loving, lustrous eyes than all his mistresses ever gave him. He 
had had so many victories, so many hunting-runs, so many 
pleasant days of winter and of autumn, with Forest King for 
his comrade and companion! He could better bear to sever 
from all other things than from the stable-monarch, whose brave 
heart never failed him, and whose honest love was always his. 

He stretched his hand out with his accustomed signal; the 
King lifted his head where he grazed, and came to him with the 
murmuring noise of pleasure he always gave at his master’s 
caress, and pressed his forehead against Cecil’s breast, and took 
such tender heed, such earnest solicitude, not to harm him with 
a touch of the mighty fore hoofs, as those only who care for 
and know horses well will understand in its relation. 

Cecil threw his arm over his neck, and leaned his own head 
down on it, so that his face was hidden. He stood motionless 
so many moments, and the King never stirred, but only pressed 
closer and closer against his bosom, as though he knew that 
this was his eternal farewell to his master. But little light 
came there, the boughs grew so thickly; and it was still and 
solitary as a desert in the gloom of the meeting trees. 

There have been many idols — idols of gold, idols of clay — less 
pure, less true than the brave and loyal-hearted beast from 
whom he parted now. 

He stood motionless a while longer, and where his face was 
hidden, the gray silken mane of the horse was wet with great, 
slow tears that forced themselves through his closed eyes; then 


172 


UNDEK TWO FLAGS. 


he laid his lips on the King’s forehead, as he might have touched 
the brow of the woman he loved; and with a backward gesture 
of his hand to his servant, plunged down into the deep slope 
of netted boughs and scarce penetrable leafage, that swung 
back into their places, and shrouded him from sight with their 
thick, unbroken screen. 

“ He’s forgot me right and away in the King,” murmured 
Rake, as he led Forest King away slowly and sorrowfully, while 
the hunter pulled and fretted to force his way to his master. 
“ Well, it’s only natural like. I’ve cause to care for him, and 
plenty on it; but he aint no sort of reason to think about me.” 

That was the way the philosopher took his wound. 

Alone, Cecil flung himself full-length down on the turf be- 
neath the beech woods; his arms thrown forward, his face 
buried in the grass, all gay with late summer forest blossoms; 
for the first time the whole might of the ruin that had fallen 
on him was understood by him; for the first time it beat him 
down beneath it, as the overstrained tension of nerve and of 
self-restraint had their inevitable reaction. He knew what this 
thing was which he had done — he had given up his whole 
future. 

Though he had spoken lightly to his servant of his intention 
to enter a foreign army, he knew himself how few the chances 
were that he could ever do so. It was possible that Rocking- 
ham might so exert his influence that he would be left unpur- 
sued, but unless this chanced so (and Baroni had seemed reso- 
lute to forego no part of his demands), the search for him 
would be in the hands of the law, and the wiles of secret police 
and of detectives’ resources spread too far and finely over the 
world for him to have a hope of ultimate escape. 

If he sought France, the Extradition Treaty would deliver 
him up; Russia — Austria — Prussia were of equal danger; he 
would be identified, and given up to trial. Into the Italian 
service he knew many a scoundrel was received unquestioned; 
and he might try the Western world; though he had no means 
to pay the passage, he might work it; he was a good sailor. 
Yachts had been twice sunk under him, by steamers, in the 
Solent and the Spezzia, and his own schooner h^d once been 
fired at by mistake for a blockade runner, when he had brought 
to, and given them a broadside from his two shotted guns 
before he would signal them their error. 

As these things swept, disordered and aimless, through his. 


THE KING’S LAST SEKVICE. 


173 


mind, he wondered if a nightmare were upon him; he, the 
darling of Belgravia, the Guards’ champion, the lover of Lady 
Guenevere, to be here outlawed and friendless; wearily rack- 
ing his brains to solve whether he had seamanship enough to 
be taken before the mast, or could stand before the tambour- 
major of a French regiment, with a chance to serve the same 
flag! 

For a while he lay there like a drunken man, heavy and mo- 
tionless, his brow resting on his arm, his face buried in the 
grass ; he had parted more easily with the woman he loved than 
he had parted with Forest King. The chimes of some far-off 
monastery, or castle-campanile, swung lazily in the morning 
stillness; the sound revived him, and recalled to him how little 
time there was if he would seek the flight that had begun on 
impulse and was continued in a firm, unshrinking resolve; he 
must go on, and on, and on; he must burrow like a fox, hide 
like a beaten cur ; he must put leagues between him and all who 
had ever known him; he must sink his very name, and iden- 
tity, and existence, under some impenetrable obscurity, or the 
burden he had taken up for others’ sake would be uselessly 
borne. There must be action of some sort or other, instant 
and unerring. 

“ It don’t matter,” he thought, with the old idle indifference, 
oddly becoming in that extreme moment the very height of 
stoic philosophy, without any thought or effort to be such ; “ I 
was going to the bad of my own accord; I must have cut and 
run for the debts, if not for this; it would have been the same 
thing, anyway, so it’s just as well to do it for them. Life’s over, 
and I’m a fool that I don’t shoot myself.” 

But there was too imperious a spirit in the Boyallieu blood 
to let him give in to disaster and do this. He rose slowly, stag- 
gering a little, and feeling blinded and dazzled with the blaze 
of the morning sun as he went out of the beech wood. There 
were the marks of the hoofs on the damp, dewy turf; his lips 
trembled a little as he saw them — he would never ride the horse 
again! 

Some two miles, more or less, lay between him and the rail- 
way. He was not certain of his way, and he felt a sickening 
exhaustion on him; he had been without food since his break- 
fast before the race. A gamekeeper’s hut stood near the en- 
trance of the wood; he had much recklessness in him, and no 
caution. He entered through the half-open door, and asked 


174 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


the keeper, who was eating his sausage and drinking his lager, 
for a meal. 

“ I’ll give you one if you’ll bring me down that hen-harrier,” 
growled the man in south German; pointing to the bird that 
was sailing far off, a mere speck in the sunny sky. 

Cecil took the rifle held out to him, and without seeming 
even to pause to take aim, fired. The bird dropped like a stone 
through the air into the distant woods. There was no tremor 
in his wrist, no uncertainty in his measure. The keeper stared ; 
the shot was one he had thought beyond any man’s range, and 
he set food and drink before his guest with a crestfallen sur- 
prise, oddly mingled with veneration. 

“ You might have let me buy my breakfast, without making 
me do murder,” said Bertie quietly, as he tried to eat. The 
meal was coarse — he could scarcely touch it; but he drank the 
beer down thirstily, and took a crust of bread. He slipped his 
ring, a great sapphire graven with his crest, off his finger, and 
held it out to the man. 

“That is worth fifty double-Fredericks. Will you take it in 
exchange for your rifle and some powder and ball ? ” 

The German stared again, open-mouthed, and clinched the 
bargain eagerly. He did not know anything about gems, but 
the splendor of this dazzled his eye, while he had guns more 
than enough, and could get many others at his lord’s cost. Cecil 
fastened a shot-belt round him, took a pow T der-flask and car- 
tridge-case, and with a few words of thanks, went on his way. 

Now that he held the rifle in his hand, he felt ready for the 
work that was before him; if hunted to bay, at any rate he 
could now have a struggle for his liberty. The keeper stood 
bewildered, gazing blankly after him down the vista of pines. 

“ Hein ! hein ! ” he growled, as he looked at the sapphire 
sparkling in his broad, brown palm ; “ I never saw such a 
with-lavishness-wasteful-and-with-courteous-speech-laconic gen- 
tleman! I wish I had not let him have the gun; he will take 
his own life, belike ; ach, Gott ! he will take his own life ! ” 

But Cecil had not bought it for that end — though he had 
called himself a fool for not sending a bullet through his brain, 
to quench in eternal darkness this ruined and wretched life 
that alone remained to him. He walked on through the still 
summer dawn, with the width of the country stretching sun- 
steeped around him. The sleeplessness, the excitement, the 
misery, the wild running of the past night had left him 


THE KING’S LAST SERVICE. 


175 


strengthless and racked with pain, but he knew that he must 
press onward or be caught, sooner or later, like netted game 
in the poacher’s silken mesh. Where to go, what to do, he knew 
no more than if he were a child; everything had always been 
ready to his hand; the only thought required of him had been 
how to amuse himself and avoid being bored ; now thrown alone 
on a mighty calamity, and brought face to face with the se- 
verity and emergency of exertion, he was like a pleasure-boat 
beaten under high billows, and driven far out to sea by the mad- 
ness of a raging nor’wester. He had no conception what to do ; 
he had but one resolve — to keep his secret; if, to do it, he killed 
himself with the rifle his sapphire ring had bought. 

Carelessly daring always, he sauntered now into the station 
for which he had made, without a sign on him that could at- 
tract observation; he wore still the violet velvet Spanish-like 
dress, the hessians, and the broad-leafed felt hat with an eagle’s 
feather fastened in it, that he had worn at the races; and with 
the gun in his hand there was nothing to distinguish him from 
any tourist “ milor,” except that in one hand he carried his 
own valise. He cast a rapid glance around; no warrant for 
his apprehension, no announcement of his personal appearance 
had preceded him here; he was safe — safe in that; safer still 
in the fact that the train rushed in so immediately on his 
arrival there, that the few people about had no time to notice or 
speculate upon him. The coupe was empty, by a happy chance ; 
he took it, throwing his money down with no heed that when the 
little he had left was once expended he would be penniless, and 
the train whirled on with him, plunging into the heart of forest 
and mountain, and the black gloom of tunnels, and the golden 
seas of corn-harvest. He was alone; and he leaned his head 
on his hands, and thought, and thought, and thought, till the 
rocking, and the rushing, and the whirl, and the noise of the 
steam on his ear and the giddy gyrations of his brain in the 
exhaustion of overstrung exertion, conquered thought. With 
the beating of the engine seeming to throb like the great swing- 
ing of a pendulum through his mind, and the whirling of the 
country passing by him like a confused phantasmagoria, his 
eyes closed, his aching limbs stretched themselves out to rest, 
a heavy dreamless sleep fell on him, the sleep of intense bodily 
fatigue, and he knew no more. 

Gendarmes awoke him to see his visa. He showed it them 
by sheer mechanical instinct, and slept again in that dead 


176 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


weight of slumber the moment he was alone. When he had 
taken his ticket and they had asked him to where it should be, 
he had answered to their amaze, “ to the farthest place it goes,” 
and he was borne on now unwitting where it went ; through the 
rich champaign and the barren plains; through the reddening 
vintage and over the dreary plateaux; through antique cities, 
and across broad, flowing rivers; through the cave of riven 
rocks, and above nestling, leafy valleys ; on and on, on and on, 
while he knew nothing, as the opium-like sleep of intense weari- 
ness held him in its stupor. 

He awoke at last with a start; it was evening; the stilly twi- 
light was settling over all the land, and the train was still rush- 
ing onward, fleet as the wind. His eyes, as they opened dream- 
ily, fell on a face half obscured in the gloaming; he leaned 
forward, bewildered and doubting his senses. 

“ Rake!” 

Rake gave the salute hurriedly and in embarrassment. 

“It’s I, sir! — yes, sir.” 

Cecil thought himself dreaming still. 

“You! You had my orders?” 

“Yes, sir; I had your orders,” murmured the ex-soldier, 
more confused than he had ever been in the whole course of 
his audacious life, “ and they was the first I ever disobeyed — 
they was. You see, sir, they was just what I couldn’t swallow 
nohow — that’s the real, right-down fact! Send me to the devil, 
Mr. Cecil, for you, and I’ll go at the first biddin’, but leave 
you just when things are on the cross for you, damn me if I 
will ! — beggin’ your pardon, sir ! ” 

And Rake, growing fiery and eloquent, dashed his cap down 
on the floor of the coupe with an emphatic declaration of re- 
sistance. Cecil looked at him in silence ; he was not certain still 
whether this were not a fantastic folly he was dreaming. 

“ Damn me if I will, Mr. Cecil ! You won’t keep me — very 
well; but you can’t prevent me follerin’ of you, and f oiler you 
I will; and so there’s no more to be said about it, sir; but just 
to let me have my own lark, as one may say. You said you’d 
go to the station, I went there; you took your ticket, I took my 
ticket. I’ve been traveling behind you till about two hours 
ago, then I looked at you ; you was asleep, sir. ‘ I don’t think 
my master’s quite well,’ says I tq Guard; ‘ I’d like to get in 
there along of him.’ ‘ Get in with you, then,’ says he (only 
we was jabbering that willainous tongue o’ theirs), for he sees 


THE KING’S LAST SERVICE. 177 

the name on my traps is the same as that on your traps — and 
in I get. Now, Mr. Cecil, let me say one word for all, and don’t 
think I’m a insolent, ne’er-do-well for having been and gone 
and disobeyed you; but you was good to me when I was sore 
in want of it; you was even good to my dog — rest his soul, 
the poor beast! there never were a braver! — and stick to you 
I will till you kick me away like a cur. The truth is, it’s only 
being near of you, sir, that keeps me straight; if I was to leave 
you I should become a bad ’un again, right and away. Don’t 
send me from you, sir, as you took mercy on me once ! ” 

Rake’s voice shook a little toward the close of his harangue, 
and in the shadows of evening light, as the train plunged 
through the gathering gloom, his ruddy, bright, bronzed face 
looked very pale and wistful. 

Cecil stretched out his hand to him in silence that spoke 
better than words. 

Rake hung his head. 

“ No, sir; you’re a gentleman, and I’ve been an awful scamp! 
It’s enough honor for me that you would do it. When I’m more 
worth it, perhaps — but that won’t never be.” 

“ You are worth it now, my gallant fellow.” His voice was 
very low ; the man’s loyalty touched him keenly. “ It was only 
for yourself, Rake, that I ever wished you to leave me.” 

“ God bless you, sir ! ” said Rake passionately ; “ them words 
are better nor ten tosses of brandy! You see, sir, I’m so spry 
and happy in a wild life, I am, and if so be as you go to them 
American parts as you spoke on, why I know ’em just as well 
as I know Newmarket Heath, every bit! They’re terrible rips 
in them parts ; kill you as soon as look at you ; it makes things 
uncommon larky out there, uncommon spicy. You aren’t never 
sure but what there’s a bowie knife a-waiting for you.” 

With which view of the delights of Western life, Rake, “ feel- 
ing like a fool,” as he thought himself, for which reason he had 
diverged into Argentine memories, applied himself to the touch- 
ing and examining of the rifle with that tenderness which only 
gunnery love and lore produce. 

Cecil sat silent a while, his head drooped down on his hands, 
while the evening deepened to night. At last he looked up. 

“ The King ? Where is he ? ” 

Rake flushed shamefacedly under his tanned skin. 

“ Beggin’ your pardon, sir ; behind you.” 

“ Behind me ? ” 


178 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“Yes, sir; him and the brown mare. I couldn’t do nothin’ 
else with ’em, you see, sir, so I shipped him along with us ; they 
don’t care for the train a bit, bless their hearts! and I’ve got 
a sharp boy a-minding of ’em. You can easily send ’em on to 
England from Paris, if you’re determined to part with ’em ; but 
you know the King always was fond of drums and trumpets 
and that like. You remember, sir, when he was a colt we 
broke him into it and taught him a bit of maneuvering; ’cause, 
till you found what pace he had in him, you’d thought of 
makin’ a charger of him. He loves the noise of soldiering — he 
do; and if he thought you was goin’ away without him, he’d 
break his heart, Mr. Cecil, sir. It was all I could do to keep 
him from follerin’ of you this morning; he sawed my arms off 
a’most.” 

With which, Rake, conscious that he had been guilty of un- 
pardonable disobedience and outrageous interference, hung his 
head over the gun ; a little anxious and a good deal ashamed. 

Cecil smiled a little, despite himself. 

“ Rake, you will do for no service, I am afraid ; you are terri- 
bly insubordinate ! ” 

He had not the heart to say more; the man’s fidelity was 
too true to be returned with rebuke; and stronger than all sur- 
prise and annoyance was a strange mingling of pain and pleas- 
ure in him to think that the horse he loved so well was still 
so near him, the comrade of his adversity as he had been the 
companion of his happiest hours. 

“ These things will keep him a few days,” he thought, as he 
looked at his hunting-watch, and the priceless pearl in each of 
his wristband-studs. He would have pawned every atom he had 
about him to have had the King with him a week longer. 

The night fell, the stars came out, the storm-rack of a com- 
ing tempest drifted over the sky, the train rushed onward 
through the thickening darkness, through the spectral country 
— it was like his life, rushing headlong down into impenetrable 
gloom. The best, the uttermost, that he could look for was a 
soldier’s grave, far away under some foreign soil. 

A few evenings later the Countess Guenevere stood alone in 
her own boudoir in her Baden suite ; she was going to dine with 
an Archduchess of Russia, and the splendid jewels of her House 
glittered through the black shower of her laces, and crowned her 
beautiful glossy hair, her delicate imperial head. In her hands 


THE KING S LAST SERVICE. 


179 


was a letter — oddly written in pencil on a leaf torn out of a 
betting-book, but without a tremor or a change in the writing 
itself. And as she stood a shiver shook her frame; in the soli- 
tude of her lighted and luxurious chamber her cheek grew pale, 
her eyes grew dim. 

“To refute the charge,” ran the last words of what was at 
best but a fragment, “ I must have broken my promise to you, 
and have compromised your name. Keeping silence myself, 
but letting the trial take place, law-inquiries so execrable and 
so minute, would soon have traced through others that I was 
with you that evening. To clear myself I must have attainted 
your name with public slander, and drawn this horrible ordeal 
on you before the world. Let me be thought guilty. It mat- 
ters little. Henceforth I shall be dead to all who know me, and 
my ruin would have exiled me without this. Do not let an 
hour of grief for me mar your peace, my dearest; think of me 
with no pain, Beatrice; only with some memory of our past 
love. I have not strength yet to say — forget me; and yet, — if 
it be for your happiness, — blot out from your remembrance 
all thought of what we have been to one another ; all thought of 
me and of my life, save to remember now and then that I was 
dear to you.” 

The words grew indistinct before her sight, they touched the 
heart of the world-worn coquette, of the victorious sovereign, 
to the core; she trembled greatly as she read them. For — in her 
hands was his fate. Though no hint of this was breathed in his 
farewell letter, she knew that with a word she could clear him, 
free him, and call him back from exile and shame, give him 
once more honor and guiltlessness in the sight of the world. 
With a word she could do this: his life was in the balance 
that she held as utterly as though it were now hers to sign, ^or 
to destroy, his death-warrant. It rested with her to speak and 
to say he had no guilt. 

But to do this she must sacrifice herself. She stood mute, 
irresolute, a shudder running through her till her diamonds 
shook in the light; the heavy tears stole slowly down, one by 
one, and fell upon the blurred and blackened paper; her heart 
ached with an exceeding bitterness. Then shudderingly still, 
and as though there were a coward crime in the action, her 
hand unclosed and let the letter fall into the spirit flame of 
a silver lamp, burning by; the words that were upon it merited 
a better fate, a fonder cherishing, but — they would have com- 


180 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


promised her. She let them fall, and burn, and wither. With 
them she gave up his life to its burden of shame, to its fate 
of exile. 

She would hear his crime condemned, and her lips would not 
open; she would hear his name aspersed, and her voice would 
not be raised; she would know that he dwelt in misery, or died 
under foreign suns unhonored and unmourned, while tongues 
around her would babble of his disgrace — and she would keep 
her peace. 

She loved him — yes ; but she loved better the dignity in which 
the world held her, and the diamonds from which the law would 
divorce her if their love were known. 

She sacrificed him for her reputation and her jewels; the 
choice was thoroughly a woman’s. 


CHAPTER XIII. 


IN THE CAFE OF THE CHASSEURS. 

The red-hot light of the after-glow still burned on the waters 
of the bay, and shed its Egyptian-like luster on the city that 
lies in the circle of the Sahel, with the Mediterranean so softly 
lashing with its violet waves the feet of the white, sloping town. 
The sun had sunk down in fire — the sun that once looked over 
those waters on the legions of Scipio and the iron brood of 
Hamilcar, and that now gave its luster on the folds of the 
French flags as they floated above the shipping of the harbor, 
and on the glitter of the French arms, as a squadron of the 
army of Algeria swept back over the hills to their barracks. 
Pell-mell in its fantastic confusion, its incongruous blending, 
its forced mixture of two races — that will touch, but never 
mingle; that will be chained together, but will never assimilate 
— the Gallic-Moorish life of the city poured out; all the color- 
ing of Haroun al Raschid scattered broadcast among Parisian 
fashion and French routine. Away yonder, on the spurs and 
tops of the hills, the green sea-pines seemed to pierce the trans- 
parent air; in the Cabash old, dreamy Arabian legends, poetic 
as Hafiz, seem still to linger here and there under the foliage 
of hanging gardens or the picturesque curves of broken ter- 
races; in the distance the brown, rugged Kabyl mountains lay 
like a couched camel, and far off against the golden haze a 
single palm rose, at a few rare intervals, with its drooped, 
curled leaves, as though to recall, amid the shame of foreign 
domination, that this was once the home of Hannibal; the 
Africa that had made Rome tremble. 

In the straight, white boulevards, as in the winding ancient 
streets; under the huge bam-like walls of barracks, as beneath 
the marvelous mosaics of mosques; the strange bizarre conflict 
of European and Oriental life spread its panorama. Staff of- 
ficers, all aglitter with crosses, galloped past; mules, laden 
with green maize and driven by lean, brown Bedouins, swept 
past the plate-glass windows of bonbon shops; grave, white- 
bearded sheiks drank petits verres in the guinguettes; sapeurs, 

181 


182 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


Chasseurs, Zouaves, cantinieres — all the varieties of French 
miltary life — mingled with jet-black Soudans, desert kings 
wrathful and silent, Eastern women shrouded in haick and 
serroual, eagle-eyed Arabs flinging back snow-white burnous, 
and handling ominously the jeweled hilts of their cangiars. 
Alcazar chansons rang out from the cafes, while in their midst 
stood the mosque, that had used to resound with the Muezzin. 
Bijou-blondine and Bebee La-la and all the sister-heroines of 
demi-monde dragged their voluminous Paris-made dresses side 
by side with Moorish beauties, who only dared show the gleam 
of their bright black eyes through the yashmak ; the reverberes * 
were lit in the Place du Gouvernement, and a group fit for the 
days of Solyman the Magnificent sat under the white marble 
beauty of the Mohammedan church. “Rien n’est sacre pour 
un sapeur ! ” was being sung to a circle of sous-ofiiciers, f close 
in the ear of a patriarch serenely majestic as Abraham; gas- 
lights were flashing, cigar shops were filling, newspapers were 
being read, the Rigolboche was being danced, commis- 
voyageurs * were chattering with grisettes, drums were beat- 
ing, trumpets were sounding, bands were playing, and, amid 
it all, grave men were dropping on their square* of carpet to 
pray, brass trays of sweetmeats were passing, ostrich eggs were 
dangling, henna-tipped fingers were drawing the envious veil 
close, and noble Oriental shadows were gliding to and fro 
through the open doors of the mosques, like a picture of the 
“ Arabian Nights,” like a poem of dead Islamism — in a word, 
it was Algiers at evening. 

In one of the cafes there, a mingling of all the nations under 
the sun was drinking demi-tasses, absinthe,, vermouth, or old 
wines, in the comparative silence that had succeeded to a 
song, sung by a certain favorite of the Spahis, known as Loo- 
Loo- j’n-m’en soucie guere, from Mile. Loo-Loo’s well-known 
habits of independence and bravado, which last had gone once 
so far as shooting a man through the chest in the Rue Bab-al- 
Oued, and setting all the gendarmes and sergents-de-ville at 
defiance afterward. Half a dozen of that famous regiment the 
Chasseurs d’Afrique were gathered together, some with their 
feet resting on the little marble-topped tables, some reading the 
French papers, all smoking their inseparable companions — the 
brules-gueles; J fine, stalwart, sun-burned fellows, with faces 

* Lamps. f Non-commissioned officers. 

| Commercial travelers. § Short pipes. 


IN aFE of the chasseurs. 183 

and figures that the glowing colors of their uniform set off to 
the best advantage. 

“ Loo-Loo was in fine voice to-night,” said one. 

“Yes; she took plenty of cognac before she sang; that always 
clears her voice,” said a second. 

“ And I think that did her spirits good, shooting that Kabyl,” 
said a third. “ By the way, did he die ? ” 

“ N’sais pas,” said the third, with a shrug of his shoulders ; 
“ Loo-Loo’s a good aim.” 

“ Sac a papier, yes ! Rire-pour-tout taught her.” 

“Ah! There never was a shot like Rire-pour-tout. When 
he went out, he always asked his adversary, ‘ Where will you 
like it ? your lungs, your heart, your brain ? It is quite a mat- 
ter of choice ; ’ — and whichever they chose, he shot there. Le 
pauvre Rire-pour-tout! he was always good-natured.” 

“ And did he never meet his match ? ” asked a sous-ofiicier 
of the line. 

The speaker looked down on the piou-piou * with superb con- 
tempt, and twisted his mustaches. “ Monsieur ! how could he ? 
He was a Chasseur.” 

“ But, if he never met his match, how did he die ? ” pursued 
the irreverent piou-piou — a little wiry man, black as. a berry, 
agile as a monkey, tough and short as a pipe-stopper. 

The magnificent Chasseur laughed in his splendid disdain. 
“ A piou-piou never killed him, that I promise you. He spitted 
half a dozen of you before breakfast, to give him a relish. How 
did Rire-pour-tout die? I will tell you.” 

He dipped his long mustaches into a beaker of still cham- 
pagne. Claude, Viscomte de Chanrellon, though in the ranks, 
could afford those luxuries. 

“ He died this way, did Rire-pour-tout ! Dieu de Dieu ! a 
very good way too. Send us all the like when our time comes ! 
We were out yonder ” (and he nooded his handsome head out- 
ward to where the brown, seared plateaux and the Kabyl moun- 
tains lay). “We were hunting Arabs, of course — pot-shooting, 
rather, as we never got nigh enough to their main body to 
have a clear charge at them. Rire-pour-tout grew sick of it. 
‘ This won’t do,’ he said ; 1 here’s two weeks gone by, and I 
haven’t shot anything but kites and jackals. I shall get my 
hand out.’ For Rire-pour-tout, as the army knows, somehow 
or other, generally potted his man every day, and he missed 
* Infantry-soldier. 


184 


UNDER TWO FLAv. 


it terribly. Well, what did he do? He rode off one morning 
and found out the Arab camp, and he waved a white flag for 
a parley. He didn’t dismount, but he just faced the Arabs and 
spoke to their Sheik. ‘ Things are slow,’ he said to them. ‘ I 
have come for a little amusement. Set aside six of your best 
warriors, and I’ll fight them one after another for the honor 
of France, and a drink of brandy to the conqueror.’ They de- 
murred ; they thought it unfair to him to have six to one. ‘ Ah ! ’ 
he laughs, ‘you have heard of Rire-pour-tout, and you are 
afraid ! ’ That put their blood up : they said they would fight 
him before all his Chasseurs. ‘ Come, and welcome,’ said Rire- 
pour-tout ; ‘ and not a hair of your beards shall be touched ex- 
cept by me.’ So the bargain was made for an hour before sunset 
that night. Mort de Dieu ! that was a grand duel ! ” 

He dipped his long mustaches again into another beaker of 
still. Talking was thirsty work; the story was well known in 
all the African army, but the piou-piou, having served in China, 
was new to the soil. 

“ The General was ill-pleased when he heard it, and half 
for arresting Rire-pour-tout ; but — sacre ! — the thing was done ; 
our honor was involved ; he had engaged to fight these men, and 
engaged for us to let them go in peace afterward; there was 
no more to be said, unless we had looked like cowards, or 
traitors, or both. There was a wide, level plateau in front of 
our camp, and the hills were at our backs — a fine field for the 
duello; and, true to time, the Arabs filed on to the plain, and 
fronted us in a long line, with their standards, and their cres- 
cents, and their cymbals and reed-pipes, and kettle-drums, all 
glittering and sounding. Sac a papier! there was a show, and 
we could not fight one of them! We were drawn up in line 
— Horse, Foot, and Artillery — Rire-pour-tout all alone, some 
way in advance; mounted, of course. The General and the 
Sheik had a conference; then the play began. There were 
six Arabs picked out — the flower of the army-^-all white and 
scarlet, and in their handsomest bravery, as if they came to 
an aouda. They were fine men — diable! — they were fine men. 
Row the duel was to be with swords; these had been selected; 
and each Arab was to come against Rire-pour-tout singly, in 
succession. Our drums rolled the pas de charge, and their cym- 
bals clashed ; they shouted ‘ F antasia ! ’ and the first Arab rode 
at him. Rire-pour-tout sat like a rock, and lunge went his 
steel through the Bedouin’s lung, before you could cry hola! 


IN THE CAFE OF THE CHASSEURS. 


185 


— a death-stroke, of course; Rire-pour-tout always killed: that 
was his perfect science. Another and another and another 
came, just as fast as the blood flowed. You know what the 
Arabs are — vous autres? how they wheel and swerve and fight 
flying? and pick up their saber from the ground, while their 
horse is galloping ventre a terre, and pierce you here and 
pierce you there, and circle round you like so many hawks? 
You know how they fought Rire-pour-tout then, one after an- 
other, more like devils than men. Mort de Dieu! it was a 
magnificent sight ! He was gashed here and gashed there ; but 
they could never unseat him, try how they would ; and one after 
another he caught them sooner or later, and sent them reeling 
out of their saddles, till there was a great red lake of blood all 
round him, and five of them lay dead or dying down in the sand. 
He had mounted afresh twice, three horses had been killed 
underneath him, and his jacket all hung in strips where the 
steel had slashed it. It was grand to see, and did one’s heart 
good; but — ventre bleu! — how one longed to go in too. 

“ There was only one left now — a young Arab, the Sheik’s 
son, and down he came like the wind. He thought with the 
shock to unhorse Rire-pour-tout, and finish him then at his 
leisure. You could hear the crash as they met, like two huge 
cymbals smashing together. Their chargers bit and tore at each 
other’s manes; they were twined in together there as if they 
were but one man and one beast; they shook and they swayed 
^and they rocked; the sabers played about their heads so quick 
that it was like lightning, as they flashed and twirled in the 
sun; the hoofs trampled up the sand till a yellow cloud hid 
their struggle, and out of it all you could see was the head of 
a horse tossing up and spouting with foam, or a sword-blade 
lifted to strike. Then the tawny cloud settled down a little, the 
sand mist cleared away, the Arab’s saddle was empty — but Rire- 
pour-tout sat like a rock. The old Chief bowed his head. ‘ It 
is over ! Allah is great ! ’ And he knew his son lay there dead. 
Then we broke from the ranks, and we rushed to the place where 
the chargers and men were piled like so many slaughtered 
sheep. Rire-pour-tout laughed such a gay, ringing laugh as the 
desert never had heard. ‘ Yive la France! ’ he cried. ‘ And now 
bring me my toss of brandy.’ Then down headlong out of his 
stirrups he reeled and fell under his horse; and when we lifted 
him up there were' two broken sword-blades buried in him, and 
the blood was pouring fast as water out of thirty wounds and 


186 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


more. That was how Bire-pour-tout died, piou-piou; laughing 
to the last. Sacre bleu! it was a splendid end; I wish I were 
sure of the like.” 

And Claude de Chanrellon drank down his third beaker, for 
overmuch speech made him thirsty. 

The men around him emptied their glasses in honor of the 
dead hero. 

“ Bire-pour-tout was a croc-mitaine,” they said solemnly, with 
almost a sigh; so tendering by their words the highest funeral 
oration. 

“You have much of such sharp service here, I suppose?” 
asked a voice in very pure French. The speaker was leaning 
against the open door of the cafe; a tall, lightly built man, 
dressed in a velvet shooting tunic, much the worse for wind and 
weather, a loose shirt, and jack-boots splashed and worn out. 

“ When we are at it, monsieur,” returned the Chasseur. “ I 
only wish we had more.” 

“ Of course. Are you in need of recruits ? ” 

“ They all want to come to us and to the Zouaves,” smiled 
Chanrellon, surveying the figure of the one who addressed him, 
with a keen sense of its symmetry and its sinew. “ Still, a good 
sword brings its welcome. Do you ask seriously, monsieur ? ” 

The bearded Arabs smoking their long pipes, the little piou- 
piou drowning his mortification in some curagoa, the idlers 
reading the “ Akbah ” or the “ Presse,” the Chasseurs lounging 
over their drink, the ecarte players lost in their game, all looked 
up at the newcomer. They thought he looked a likely wearer 
of the dead honors of Bire-pour-tout. 

He did not answer the question literally, but came over 
from the doorway and seated himself at the little marble table 
opposite Claude, leaning his elbows on it. 

“ I have a doubt,” he said. “ I am more inclined to your 
foes.” 

“Dieu de Dieu!” ejaculated Chanrellon, pulling at his 
tawny mustaches. “ A bold thing to say before five Chasseurs.” 

He smiled, a little contemptuously, a little amusedly. 

“ I am not a croc-mitaine,* perhaps ; but I say what I think, 
with little heed of my auditors, usually.” 

Chanrellon bent his bright brown eyes curiously on him. 
“ He is a croc-mitaine,” he thought. “ He is not to be lost.” 

“ I prefer your foes,” went on the other, quite quietly, quite 
* Fire-eater. 


m THE CAFE OF THE CHASSEURS. 187 

listlessly, as though the glittering, gas-lit cafe were not full of 
F rench soldiers. “ In the first place, they are on the losing 
side; in the second, they are the lords of the soil; in the third, 
they live as free as air; and in the fourth, they have undoubt- 
edly the right of the quarrel ! ” 

“ Monsieur ! ” cried the Chasseurs, laying their hands on their 
swords, fiery as lions. He looked indolently and wearily up 
from under the long lashes of his lids, and went on, as though 
they had not spoken. 

“ I will fight you all, if you like, as that worthy of yours, 
Rire-pour-tout, did, but I don’t think it’s worth while,” he said 
carelessly, where he leaned over the marble table. “ Brawling’s 
bad style; we don’t do it. I was saying, I like your foes best; 
mere matter of taste; no need to quarrel over it — that I see. 
I shall go into their service or into yours, monsieur — will you 
play a game of dice to decide ! ” 

“ Decide ? — but how ? ” 

“ Why — this way,” said the other, with the weary listlessness 
of one who cares not two straws how things turn. “ If I win, 
I go to the Arabs ; if you win, I come to your ranks.” 

“ Mort de Dieu ! it is a droll gambling,” murmured Chan- 
rellon. “ But — if you do win, do you think we shall let you 
go off to our enemies ? Pas si bete, monsieur ! ” * 

“ Yes, you will,” said the other quietly. “ Men who knew 
what honor meant enough to redeem Bire-pour-tout’s pledge of 
safety to the Bedouins, will not take advantage of an openly 
confessed and unarmed adversary.” 

A murmur of ratification ran through his listeners. 

Chanrellon swore a mighty oath. 

“ Pardieu, no. You are right. If you want to go, you shall 
go. Hola there! bring the dice. Champagne, monsieur? Ver- 
mouth ? cognac ? ” 

“Nothing, I thank you.” 

He leaned back with an apathetic indolence and indifference 
oddly at contrast with the injudicious daring of his war-pro- 
voking words and the rough campaigning that he sought. The 
assembled Chasseurs eyed him curiously ; they liked his manner 
and they resented his first speeches ; they noted every particular 
about him — his delicate white hands, his weather-worn and 
travel-stained dress, his fair, aristocratic features, his sweeping, 


* “ Not such fools, monsieur/ 


188 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


abundant beard, his careless, cool, tired, reckless way; and they 
were uncertain what to make of him. 

The dice were brought. 

“ What stakes, monsieur ? ” asked Chanrellon. 

“ Ten napoleons a side — and — the Arabs.” 

He set ten napoleons down on the table; they were the only 
coins he had in the world; it was very characteristic that he 
risked them. 

They threw the main — two sixes. 

“ You see,” he murmured, with a half smile, “ the dice know 
it is a drawn duel between you and the Arabs.” 

“ C’est un drole, c’est un brave ! ” * muttered Chanrellon ; 
and they threw again. 

The Chasseur cast a five ; his was a five again. 

“ The dice cannot make up their minds,” said the other list- 
lessly, “ they know you are Might and the Arabs are Right.” 

The Frenchmen laughed; they could take a jest good- 
humoredly, and alone amid so many of them, he was made 
sacred at once by the very length of odds against him. 

They rattled the boxes and threw again — Chanrellon’s was 
three; his two. 

“ Ah ! ” he murmured. “ Right kicks the beam and loses ; it 
always does, poor devil ! ” 

The Chasseur leaned across the table, with his brown, fear- 
less, sunny eyes full of pleasure. 

“Monsieur! never lament such good fortune for France. 
You belong to us now; let me claim you! ” 

He bowed more gravely than he had borne himself hitherto. 

“ You do me much honor; fortune has willed it so. One word 
only in stipulation.” 

Chanrellon assented courteously. 

“ As many as you choose.” 

“I have a companion who must be brigaded with me, and 
I must go on active service at once.” 

“ With infinite pleasure. That doubtless can be arranged. 
You shall present yourself to-morrow morning; and for to- 
night, this is not the season here yet; and we are triste a faire 
fremir; \ still I can show you a little fun, though it is not 
Paris!” 

But he rose and bowed again. 


* “ An odd fellow ! A brave fellow ! ” 


t Frightfully dull. 


IN THE CAFE OF THE CHASSEUES. 189 

“ I thank yon, not to-night. Yon shall see me at your bar- 
racks with the morning.” 

“ Ah, ah ! monsieur ! ” cried the Chasseur eagerly, and a little 
annoyed. “ What warrant have we that you will not dispute 
the decree of the dice, and go off to your favorites, the Arabs ? ” 

He turned back and looked full in Chanrellon’s face, his own 
eyes a little surprised, and infinitely weary. 

“ What warrant ? My promise.” 

Then, without another syllable, he lounged slowly out 
through the soldiers and the idlers, and disappeared in the con- 
fused din and chiar-oscuro of the gas-lit street without, through 
the press of troopers, grisettes, merchants, beggars, sweetmeat- 
sellers, lemonade-sellers, curagoa sellers, gaunt Bedouins, negro 
boys, shrieking muleteers, laughing lorettes, and glittering 
staff officers. 

“ That is done! ” he murmured to his own thoughts. “ How 
for life under another flag ! ” 

Claude de Chanrellon sat mute and amazed a while, gazing 
at the open door; then he drank a fourth beaker of champagne 
and flung the emptied glass down with a mighty crash. 

“ Ventre bleu! whoever he is, that man will eat fire, bons 
gargons ! ” 


CHAPTER XIV. 


“de profundis” before “plunging/* 

Three months later it was guest-night in the messroom of 
a certain famous light cavalry regiment, who bear the reputa- 
tion of being the fastest corps in the English service. Of a 
truth, they do “ plunge ” a little too wildly ; and stories are 
told of bets over ecarte in their anteroom that have been 
prompt extinction forever and aye to the losers, for they rarely 
play money down, their stakes are too high, and moderate for- 
tunes may go in a night with the other convenient but fatal 
system. But, this one indiscretion apart, they are a model 
corps for blood, for dash, for perfect social accord, for the 
finest horseflesh in the kingdom, and the best president at a 
mess-table that ever drilled the cook to matchlessness, and made 
the iced dry, and the old burgundies, the admired of all new- 
comers. 

Just now they had pleasant quarters enough in York, had 
a couple of hundred hunters, all in all, in their stalls, were 
showing the Ridings that they could “ go like birds,” and were 
using up their second horses with every day out, in the first 
of the season. A cracker over the best of the ground with the 
York and Ainsty, that had given two first-rate things quick as 
lightning, and both closed with a kill, had filled the day; and 
they were dining with a fair quantity of county guests, and 
all the splendor of plate, and ceremony, and magnificent hos- 
pitalities which characterize those beaux sabreurs wheresoever 
they go. At one part of the table a discussion was going on 
as the claret passed around; wines were perfection at the mess, 
but they drank singularly little ; it was not their “ form ” ever 
to indulge in that way; and the Chief, as dashing a sabreur as 
ever crossed a saddle, though lenient to looseness in all other 
matters, and very young for his command, would have been 
down like steel on “ the boys,” had any of them taken to the 
pastime of overmuch drinking in any shape. 

“ I can’t get the rights of the story,” said one of the guests, 
a hunting baronet, and M. F. H. “ It’s something very dark, 
isn’t it?” 


190 


“DE PROFUKDIs” BEFORE “ PLUNGING.” 


191 


“ Very dark,” assented a tall, handsome man, with an habit- 
ual air of the most utterly exhausted apathy ever attained by 
the human features, but who, nevertheless, had been christened, 
by the fiercest of the warrior nations of the Punjaub, as the 
Shumsheer-i-Shaitan, or Sword of the Evil One, so terrible had 
the circling sweep of one back stroke of his, when he was quite 
a boy, become to them. 

“ Guards cut up fearfully rough,” murmured one near him, 
known as “ the Dauphin.” “ Such a low sort of thing, you 
know; that’s the worst of it. Seraph’s name, too.” 

“ Poor old Seraph ! he’s fairly bowled over about it,” added 
a third. “Feels it awfully — by Jove, he does! It’s my belief 
he paid those Jew fellows the whole sum to get the pursuit 
slackened.” 

“ So Thelusson says. Thelusson says Jews have made a 
cracker by it. I dare say! Jews always do,” muttered a fourth. 
“ First Life would have given Beauty a million sooner than 
have him do it. Horrible thing for the Household.” 

“ But is he dead ? ” pursued their guest. 

“Beauty? Yes; smashed in that express, you know.” 

“But there was no evidence?” 

“ I don’t know what you call evidence,” murmured “ the 
Dauphin.” “ Horses are sent to England from Paris ; clearly 
shows he went to Paris. Marseilles train smashes ; twenty peo- 
ple ground into indistinguishable amalgamation; two of the 
amalgamated jammed head foremost in a carriage alone; only 
traps in carriage with them, Beauty’s traps, with name clear on 
the brass outside, and crest clear on silver things inside; two 
men ground to atoms, but traps safe ; two men, of course Beauty 
and servant; man was a plucky fellow, sure, to stay with him.” 

And having given the desired evidence in lazy little intervals 
of speech, he took some Rhenish. 

“ Well — yes ; nothing could be more conclusive, certainly,” 
assented the Baronet, resignedly convinced. “ It was the best 
thing that could happen under the unfortunate circumstances; 
so Lord Royallieu thinks, I suppose. He allowed no one to 
wear mourning, and had his unhappy son’s portrait taken down 
and burned.” 

“ How melodramatic ! ” reflected Leo Charteris. “ How what 
the deuce can it hurt a dead man to have his portrait made into 
a bonfire ? Old lord always did hate Beauty, though. Rock does 
all the mourning; he’s cut up no end; never saw a fellow so 


192 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


knocked out of time. Vowed at first he’d sell out, and go into 
the Austrian service; swore he couldn’t stay in the Household, 
but would get a command of some Heavies, and be changed to 
India.” 

“ Duke didn’t like that — didn’t want him shot ; nobody else,, 
you see, for the title. By George! I wish you’d seen Rock the 
other day on the Heath; little Pulteney came up to him.” 

“What Pulteney? — Jimmy, or the Earl?” 

“Oh, the Earl! Jimmy would have known better. These 
new men never know anything. ‘You purchased that famous 
steeple-chaser of his from Mr. Cecil’s creditors, didn’t you ? ’ 
asks Pulteney. Rock just looks him over. Such a look, by 
George! ‘ I received Forest King as my dead friend’s last gift.’ 
Pulteney never takes the hint — not he. On he blunders : ‘ Be- 
cause, if you were inclined to part with him, I want a good new 
hunting strain, with plenty of fencing power, and I’d take him 
for the stud at any figure you liked.’ I thought the Seraph would 
have knocked him down — I did, upon my honor! He was red 
as this wine in a second with rage, and then as white as a 
woman. ‘ You are quite right,’ he says quietly, and I swear each 
word cut like a bullet, ‘ you do want a new strain with some- 
thing like breeding in it, but — I hardly think you’ll get it for 
the three next generations. You must learn to know what it 
means first.’ Then away he lounges, leaving Pulteney 
plante-la. By Jove! I don’t think the Cotton-Earl will forget 
this Cambridgeshire in a hurry, or try horse-dealing on the 
Seraph again.” 

Laughter loud and long greeted the story. 

“Poor Beauty! ” said the Dauphin, “he’d have enjoyed that. 
He always put down Pulteney himself. I remember his tellingj 
me he was on duty at Windsor once when Pulteney was stay- 
ing there. Pulteney’s always horribly funked at Court; fright- 
ened out of his life when he dines with any royalties; makes 
an awful figure too in a public ceremony; can’t walk backward 
for any money, and at his first levee tumbled down right in 
the Queen’s face. How at the Castle one night he just hap- 
pened to come down a corridor as Beauty was smoking. Beauty 
made believe to take him for a servant, took out a sovereign, 
and tossed it to him. ‘ Here, keep a still tongue about my 
cigar, my good fellow ! ’ Pulteney turned hot and cold, and 
stammered out God knows what, about his mighty dignity being 
mistaken for a valet. Bertie just laughed a little, ever so 


“de pkofundis” befoke “plunging.” 


193 


softly. ‘ Beg your pardon — thought you were one of the peo- 
ple; wouldn’t have done it for worlds; I know you’re never at 
ease with a sovereign ! ’ Now Pulteney wasn’t likely to forget 
that. If he wanted the King, I’ll lay any money it was to give 
him to some wretched mount who’d break his back over a fence 
in a selling race.” 

“Well, he won’t have him; Seraph don’t intend to have the 
horse ever ridden or hunted at all.” 

“ Nonsense! ” 

“By Jove, he means it! nobody’s to cross the King’s back; 
he wants weight-carriers himself, you know, and precious 
strong ones too. The King’s put in the stud at Lyonnesse. 
Poor Bertie! nobody ever managed a close finish as he did at 
the Grand National — last but two — don’t you remember?” 

“Yes; waited so beautifully on Fly-by-Night, and shot by 
him like lightning, just before the run-in. Pity he went to the 
bad!” 

“ Ah ! what a hand he played at ecarte ; the very best of the 
French science.” 

“ But reckless at whist ; a wild game there — uncommonly 
wild. Drove Cis Delareux half mad one night at Koyallieu 
with the way he threw his trumps out. Old Cis dashed his 
cards down at last, and looked him full in the face. ‘ Beauty, 
do you know, or do you not know, that a whist-table is not to 
be taken as you take timber in a hunting-field, on the principle 
of clear it or smash it.?’ ‘ Faith!’ said Bertie, ‘ clear it or 

smash it is a very good rule for anything, but a trifle too ener- 
getic for me.’ ” 

“ The deuce, he’s had enough of ‘ smashing ’ at last ! I wish 
he hadn’t come to grief in that style; it’s a shocking bore for 
the Guards — such an ugly story.” 

“ It was uncommonly like him to get killed just when he did 
— best possible taste.” 

“ Only thing he could do.” 

“ Better taste would have been to do it earlier. I always won- 
dered he stopped for the row.” 

“ Oh, never thought it would turn up ; trusted to a fluke.” 

He whom the Punjaub knew as the Sword of the Evil One, 
but who held in polite Society tho title of Lord Kergenven, 
drank some hock slowly, and murmured as his sole quota to the 
conversation, very lazily and languidly: 

“ Bet you he isn’t dead at all.” 


194 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ The deuce you do ? And why ? ” chorused the table ; “ when 
a fellow’s body’s found with all his traps round him ! ” 

“ I don’t believe he’s dead,” murmured Kergenven with closed, 
slumberous eyes. 

“ But why ? Have you heard anything ? ” 

“ Hot a word.” 

“ Why do you say he’s alive, then ? ” 

My lord lifted his brows ever so little? 

“ I think so, that’s all.” 

“ But you must have a reason, Ker ? ” 

Badgered into speech, Kergenven drank a little more hock, 
and dropped out slowly, in the mellowest voice in the world, 
the following: 

“ It don’t follow one has reasons for anything ; pray don’t 
get logical. Two years ago I was out in a chasse au sanglier, 
central France; perhaps you don’t know their work? It’s un- 
commonly queer. Break up the Alps into little bits, scatter 
’em pell-mell over a great forest, and then set a killing pack to 
hunt through and through it. Delightful chance for coming 
to grief ; even odds that if you don’t pitch down a ravine, you’ll 
get blinded for life by a branch; that if you don’t get flattened 
under a bowlder, you’ll be shot by a twig catching your rifle- 
trigger. Uncommonly good sport.” 

Exhausted with so lengthened an exposition of the charms 
of the venerie and the hallali, he stopped, and dropped a walnut 
into some Regency sherry. 

“ Hang it, Ker ! ” cried the Dauphin. “ What’s that to do 
with Beauty?” 

My lord let fall a sleepy glance of surprise and of rebuke 
from under his black lashes, that said mutely, “ Do I, who hate 
talking, ever talk wide of any point ? ” 

“Why, this,” he murmured. “ He was with us down at Veille- 
roc — Louis d’Auvrai’s place, you know; and we were out after 
an old boar — not too old to race; but still tough enough to be 
likely to turn and trust to his tusks if the pace got very hot, 
and he was hard pressed at the finish. We hadn’t found till 
rather late, the limeurs were rather new to the work, and the 
November day was short, of course; the pack got on the slot 
of a roebuck too, and were off the boar’s scent a little while, 
running wild. Altogether we got scattered, and in the forest 
it grew almost as dark as pitch; you followed just as you could, 
and could only guide yourself by your ear when the hounds gave 



if-'* 


Photo by Byron 




195 


“de profundis” before “plunging.” 

cry, or the horns sounded. On you blundered, hit or miss, 
headlong down the rocks and through the branches; horses 
warmed wonderfully to the business, scrambled like cats, slid 
down like otters, kept their footing where nobody ’d have 
thought anything but a goat could stand. Our hunting bloods 
knock up over a cramped country like Monmouthshire; they 
wouldn’t live an hour in a French forest. You see we just look 
for pace and strength in the shoulders; we don’t much want 
anything else — except good jumping power. What a lot of fel- 
lows — even in the crack packs — will always funk water ! 
Horses will fly, but they can’t swim. Now, to my fancy, a clever 
beast ought to take even a swelling bit of water like a duck. 
How poor Standard breasted rivers till that fool staked him ! ” 

He dropped more walnuts into his wine, wistfully recalling 
a mighty hero of Leicestershire fame, that had given him many 
a magnificent day out, and had been the idol of his stables, till 
in his twelfth year the noble old sorrel had been killed by a 
groom’s recklessness; recklessness that met with such chastise- 
ment as told how and why the hill-tribes’ sobriquet had been 
given to the hand that would lie so long in indolent rest, to 
strike with such fearful force when once raised. 

“ Well,” he went on once more, “we were all of us scattered; 
scarcely two kept together anywhere ; where the pack was, where 
the boar was, where the huntsmen were, nobody knew. Now and 
then I heard the hounds giving tongue at the distance, and I 
rode after that to the best of my science; and uncommonly bad 
was the best. That forest work perplexes one, after the grass- 
country. You can’t view the beauties two minutes together; 
and as for sinning by overriding ’em, you’re very safe not to 
do that! At last I heard a crashing sound, loud and furious; 
I thought they had got him to bay at last. There was a great 
oak thicket as hard as iron, and as close at a net, between me 
and the place; the boughs were all twisted together, God knows 
how, and grew so low down that the naked branches had to be 
broken through at every step by the horse’s fore hoofs, before 
he could force a step. We did force it somehow at last, and 
came into a green, open space, where there were fewer trees, 
and the moon was shining in ; there, without a hound near, true 
enough was the boar rolling on the ground, and somebody roll- 
ing under him. They were locked in so close they looked just 
like one huge beast, pitching here and there, as you’ve seen the 
rhinos wallow in Indian jheels. Of course, I leveled my rifle, 


196 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


but I wait 3d to get a clear aim; for which was man and which 
was boar, the deuce a bit could I tell; just as I had pointed, 
Beauty’s voice called out to me : ‘ Keep your fire, Ker ! I want to 
have him myself.’ It was he that was under the brute. Just 
as he spoke they rolled toward me, the boar foaming and spout- 
ing blood, and plunging his tusks into Cecil; he got his right 
arm out from under the beast, and crushed under there as he 
was, drew it free, with the knife well gripped; then down he 
dashed it three times into the veteran’s hide, just beneath the 
ribs; it was the coup de grace; the boar lay dead, and Beauty 
lay half dead too ; the blood rushing out of him where the tusks 
had dived. Two minutes, though, and a draught of my brandy 
brought him all round; and the first words he spoke were, 
‘ Thanks, Ker ; you did as you would be done by — a shot would 
have spoilt it all.’ The brute had crossed his path far away 
from the pack, and he had flung himself out of saddle and had 
a neck-and-neck struggle. And that night we played baccarat 
by his bedside to amuse him; and he played just as well as 
ever. Now this is why I don’t think he’s dead; a fellow who 
served a wild boar like that won’t have let a train knock him 
over. And I don’t believe he forged that stiff, though all the evi- 
dence says so ; Beauty hadn’t a touch of the blackguard in him.” 

With which declaration of his views, Kergenven lapsed into 
immutable silence and slumberous apathy, from whose shelter 
nothing could tempt him afresh; and the Colonel, with all the 
rest, lounged into the anteroom, where the tables were set, and 
began “ plunging ” in earnest at sums that might sound fabu- 
lous, were they written here. The players staked heavily; but 
it was the galerie who watched around, making their bets, and 
backing their favorites, that lost on the whole the most. 

“ Horse Guards have heard of the plunging ; think we’re go- 
ing too fast,” murmured the Chief to Kergenven, his Major, 
who lifted his brows, and murmured back with the demureness 
of a maiden: 

“Tell ’em it’s our only vice; we’re models of propriety.” 

Which possibly would not have been received with the belief 
desirable by the skeptics of Pall Mall. 

So the De Prof undis was said over Bertie Cecil ; and 
“ Beauty of the Brigades ” ceased to be named in the service, 
and soon ceased to be even remembered. In the steeple-chase 
of life there is no time to look back at the failures, who have 
gone down over a “ double and drop,” and fallen out of the pace. 



Photo by Byron 





CHAPTER XV. 


“L’AMIE DU DRAPEAU.” 

“ Did I not say he would eat fire ? ” 

“ Pardieu ! c’est un brave.” 

“ Rides like an Arab.” 

“ Smokes like a Zouave.” 

“ Cuts off a head with that back circular sweep — ah — h h ! 

magnificent ! ” 

“ And dances like an Aristocrat ; not like a tipsy Spahi ! ” 

The last crown to the chorus of applause, and insult to the 
circle of applauders, was launched with all the piquance of 
inimitable canteen-slang and camp-assurance, from a speaker 
who had perched astride on a broken fragment of wall, with her 
barrel of wine set up on end on the stones in front of her, and 
her six soldiers, her gros bebees,* as she was given maternally 
to calling them, lounging at their ease on the arid, dusty turf 
below. She was very pretty, audaciously pretty, though her 
skin was burned to a bright sunny brown, and her hair was 
cut as short as a boy’s, and her face had not one regular fea- 
ture in it. But then — regularity! who wanted it, who would 
have thought the most pure classic type a change for the better, 
with those dark, dancing, challenging eyes ; with that arch, bril- 
liant, kitten-like face, so sunny, so mignon, and those scarlet 
lips like a bud of camellia that were never so handsome as when 
a cigarette was between them, or sooth to say, not seldom a 
brule guele f itself ? ” 

She was pretty, she was insolent, she was intolerably coquet- 
tish, she was mischievous as a marmoset; she would swear, if 
need be, like a Zouave; she could fire galloping, she could toss 
off her brandy or her vermouth like a trooper; she would on 
occasion clinch her little brown hand and deal a blow that the 
recipient would not covet twice; she was an enfant de Paris and 
had all its wickedness at her fingers ; she would sing you guin- 
guette songs till you were suffocated with laughter, and she 
would dance the cancan at the Salle de Mars, with the biggest 
* Big babies. f Short pipe. 


197 


198 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


giant of a Cuirassier there. And yet with all that, she was not 
wholly unsexed; with all that she had the delicious fragrance 
of youth, and had not left a certain feminine grace behind 
her, though she wore a vivandiere’s uniform, and had been born 
in a barrack, and meant to die in a battle; it was the blending 
of the two that made her piquante, made her a notoriety in 
her own way; known at pleasure, and equally, in the Army 
of Africa as “ Cigarette,” and “ L’Amie du Drapeau.” 

“ Not like a tipsy Spahi ! ” It was a cruel cut to her gros 
bebees, mostly Spahis, lying there at her feet, or rather at the 
foot of the wall, singing the praises — with magnanimity be- 
yond praise — of a certain Chasseur d’Afrique. 

“Ho, Cigarette!” growled a little Zouave, known as Tata 
Leroux. “ That is the way thou forsakest thy friends for the 
first fresh face.” 

“ Well, it is not a face like a tobacco-stopper, as thine is, 
Tata ! ” responded Cigarette, with a puff of her namesake ; the 
repartee of the camp is apt to be rough. “ He is Bel-a-faire- 
peur, as you nickname him.” 

“ A woman’s face ! ” growled the injured Tata ; whose own 
countenance was of the color and well-nigh of the flatness of 
one of the red bricks of the wall. 

“Ouf!” said the Friend of the Flag, with more expression 
in that single ejaculation than could be put in a volume. “ He 
does woman’s deeds, does he? He has woman’s hands, but they 
can fight, 1 fancy? Six Arabs to his own sword the other day 
in that skirmish ! Superb ! ” 

“ Sapristi ! And what did he say, this droll, when he looked 
at them lying there? Just shrugged his shoulders and rode 
away. i I’d better have killed myself ; less mischief, on the 
whole ! ’ Now who is to make anything of such a man as that ? ” 

“ Ah ! he did not stop to cut their gold buttons off, and steal 
their cangiars, as thou wouldst have done, Tata? Well! he has 
not learned la guerre,” * laughed Cigarette. “ It was a waste ; 
he should have brought me their sashes, at least. By the way — 
when did he join? ” 

“ Ten — twelve — years ago, or thereabouts.” 

“ He should have learned to strip Arabs by this time, then,” 
said the Amie du Drapeau, turning the tap of her barrel to 
replenish the wine-cup ; “ and to steal from them too, living or 
dead. Thou must take him in hand, Tata ! ” 

* The art of war. 


199 


“l’aMIE DU DRAPEAU.” 

Tata laughed, considering that he had received a compliment. 

“ Diable ! I did a neat thing yesterday. Out on the hills, 
there, was a shepherd ; he’d got two live geese swinging by their 
feet. They were screeching — screeching — screeching ! — and 
they looked so nice and so plump that I could smell them, as 
if they were stewing in a casserole, till I began to get as hungry 
as a gamin. A lunge would just have cut the question at once; 
but the orders have got so strict about potting the natives I 
thought I wouldn’t have any violence, if the thing would go 
nice and smoothly. So I just walked behind him, and tripped 
him up before he knew where he was — it was a picture ! He was 
down with his face in the sand before you could sing Tra-la-la! 
Then I just sat upon him; but gently — very gently; and what 
with the sand and the heat, and the surprise, and, in truth, per- 
haps, a little too, my own weight, he was half suffocated. He had 
never seen me; he did not know what it was that was sitting 
on him ; and I sent my voice out with a roar — ‘ I am a demon, 
and the fiend hath bidden me take him thy soul to-night ! ’ 
Ah! how he began to tremble, and to kick, and to quiver. He 
thought it was the devil a-top of him; and he began to moan, 
as well as the sand would let him, that he was a poor man, and 
an innocent, and the geese were the only things he ever stole 
in all his life. Then I went through a little pantomime with 
him, and I was very terrible in my threats, and he was choking 
and choking with the sand, though he never let go of the geese. 
At last I relented a little, and told him I would spare him that 
once, if he gave up the stolen goods, and never lifted his head 
for an hour. Sapristi ! how glad he was of the terms ! I dare 
say my weight was unpleasant; so the geese made us a divine 
stew that night, and the last thing I saw of my man was his ly- 
ing flat as I left him, with his face still down in the sand-hole.” 

Cigarette nodded and laughed. 

“Pretty fair, Tata; but I have heard better. Bah! a grand 
thing certainly, to fright a peasant, and scamper off with a 
goose ! ” 

“ Sacre bleu!” grumbled Tata, who was himself of opinion 
that his exploit had been worthy of the feats of Harlequin; 
“ thy heart is all gone to the Englishman.” 

Cigarette laughed saucily and heartily, tickled at the joke. 
Sentiment has an exquisitely ludicrous side when one is a 
vivandiere aux yeux noirs,* perched astride on a wall, and 
* A black-eyed wine-seller. 


200 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


dispensing bandy-dashed wine to half a dozen sun-baked 
Spahis. 

“ Vivandi&re du regiment, 

C’est Catin qu’on me nomme ; 

Je vends, je donne, je bois gaiment, 

Mon vin et mon rogomme ; 

J’ai le pied leste et l’oeil mutin, 

Tintin, tintin, tintin, r’lin tintin, 

Soldats, voil& Catin ! ” 

she sang with the richest, freshest, mellowest voice that ever 
chanted the deathless refrains of the French Lucilius. . 

“ My heart is a reveil matin, Tata ; it wakes fresh every day. 
An Englishman, perdie ! Why dost thou think him that ? ” 

“Because he is a giant,” said Tata. 

Cigarette snapped her fingers: 

“ I have danced with grenadiers and cuirassiers quite as tall, 
and twice as heavy. Apres ? ” 

“ Because he bathes — splash ! like any water-dog.” 

“ Because he is silent.” 

“ Because he rises in his stirrups.” 

“ Because he likes the sea.” 

“ Because he knows le boxe.” * 

“ Because he is so quiet, and blazes like the devil under- 
neath.” 

Under which mass of overwhelming proofs of nationality the 
Amie du Drapeau gave in. 

“ Yes, like enough. Besides, the other one is English. Lour-i- 
loo, of the Chasses-marais, f tells me that the other one waits 
on him like a slave when he can — cleans his harness, litters 
his horse, saves him all the hard work, when he can do it with- 
out being found out. Where did they come from ? ” 

“ They will never tell.” 

Cigarette tossed her nonchalant head, with a pout of her 
cherry lips, and a slang oath, light as a bird, wicked as a 
rigolbochade. 

“ Paf ! — they will tell it to me ! ” 

“ Chut ! Thou mayest make a lion tame, a vulture leave 
blood, a drum beat its own rataplan, a dead man fire a clari- 
nette \ a six pieds ; but thou wilt never make an Englishman 
speak when he is bent to be silent.” 

Cigarette launched a choice missile of barrack slang at an 
* Boxing. f Chasseurs d’Afi’ique. J A musket. 



Photo by Sarony 






“i/AMIE DU DRAPEAU 201 

array of metaphors, which their propounder thought stu- 
pendous in their brilliancy. 

“ Becasse ! When you stole your geese, you did but take 
your brethren home! Englishmen are but men. Put the wine 
in their head, make them whirl in a waltz, promise them a kiss, 
and one turns such brains as they have inside out, as a piou- 
piou * turns a dead soldier’s wallet. When a woman is hand- 
some, she is never denied. He shall tell me where he comes 
from. I doubt that it is from England ! see here — why not ? ” 
and she checked the Hoes off on her lithe brown fingers; “first, 
he never says God-damn; second, he don’t eat his meat raw; 
third, he speaks very soft; fourth, he waltzes so light, so light! 
fifth, he never grumbles in his throat like an angry bear; sixth, 
there is no fog in him. How can he be English with all that ? ” 

“ There are English, and English,” said the philosophic Tata, 
who piqued himself on being serenely cosmopolitan. 

Cigarette blew a contemptuous puff of smoke. 

“ There was never one yet that did not growl ! Pauvres 
diables! if they don’t use their tusks, they sit and sulk! — an 
Englishman is always boxing or grumbling — the two make up 
his life.” 

Which view of Anglo-rabies she had derived from a profound 
study of various vaudevilles, in which the traditional God-damn 
was pre-eminent in his usual hues; and having delivered it, 
she sprang down from her wall, strapped on her little barillet,f 
/nodded to her gros bebees, where they lounged full-length in 
the shadow of the stone wall, and left them to resume their 
game at Boc, while she started on her way, as swift and as 
light as a chamois; singing, with gay, ringing emphasis, that 
echoed all down the hot and silent air, the second verse of 
Beranger : 

“ Je fus ch&re k tous nos h^ros ; 

H£las ! combien j’en pleure, 

Ainsi soldats et g4n£raux 
Me comblaient a tout heure, 

D’amour de gloire et de butin, 

Tintin, tintin, tintin, r’lin tintin, 

D’amour de gloire et de butin, 

Soldats, voiia. Catin ! ” 

The song was not altogether her song, however, for she had 
wept for none — wept not at all: she had never shed tears in 


* Infantry soldier. 


t Little barrel. 


202 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


her life. A dashing, dauntless, vivacious life, just in its youth, 
loving plunder, and mischief, and mirth; caring for nothing; 
and always ready with a laugh, a song, a slang repartee, or a 
shot from the dainty pistols thrust in her sash, that a general 
of division had given her, whichever best suited the moment. 

Her mother a camp-follower, her father nobody knew who; 
a spoiled child of the Army from Tier birth, with a heart as 
bronzed as her cheek, and her respect for the laws of meum and 
tuum nil; yet with odd, stray, nature-sown instincts here and 
there, of a devil-may-care nobility, and of a wild grace that 
nothing could kill — Cigarette was the pet of the Army of Africa, 
and was as lawless as most of her patrons. 

She would eat a succulent duck, thinking it all the spicier 
because it had been a soldier’s “ loot ” ; she would wear the 
gold plunder off dead Arabs’ dress, and never have a pang of 
conscience with it; she would dance all night long, when she 
had a chance, like a little Bacchante; she would shoot a man, 
if need be, with all the nonchalance in the world. She had had 
a thousand lovers, from handsome marquesses of the Guides to 
tawny, black-browed scoundrels in the Zouaves, and she had 
never loved anything, except the roll of the pas de charge, and 
the sight of her own arch, defiant face, with its scarlet lips and 
its short jetty hair, when she saw it by chance in some burnished 
cuirass, that served her for a mirror. She was more like a 
handsome, saucy boy than anything else under the sun, and yet 
there was that in the pretty, impudent, little Friend of the 
Flag that was feminine with it all — generous and graceful amid 
all her boldness, and her license, her revelries, and the unset- 
tled life she led in the barracks and the camps, under the 
shadow of the eagles. 

Away she went, now singing: 

“ Mais je ris en sage, 

Bon ! 

La farira dondaine, 

Gai ! 

La farira dond^e ! ” 

down the crooked windings and over the ruined gardens of 
the old Moorish quarter of the Cashbah; the hilts of the tiny 
pistols glancing in the sun, and the fierce fire of the burning 
sunlight pouring down unheeded on the brave, bright hawk 
eyes that had never, since they first opened to the world, drooped 


“l’aMIE DU DRAPEAU.” 203 

or dimmed for the rays of the sun, or the gaze of a lover; for 
the menace of death, or the presence of war. 

Of course, she was a little Amazon ; of course, she was a little 
Guerrilla; of course, she did not know what a blush meant; 
of course, her thoughts were as slang and as riotous as her 
mutinous mischief was in its act ; but she was “ bon soldat,” 
as she was given to say, with a toss of her curly head; and she 
had some of the virtues of soldiers. Soldiers had been about 
her ever since she first remembered having a wooden casserole 
for a cradle, and sucking down red wine through a pipe-stem. 
Soldiers had been her books, her teachers, her models, her guar- 
dians, and, later on, her lovers, all the days of her life. She 
had had no guiding-star, except the eagles on the standards; 
she had had no cradle-song, except the rataplan and the 
reveille; she had had no sense of duty taught her, except to 
face fire boldly, never to betray a comrade, and to worship but 
two deities, “la Gloire” and “la France.” 

Yet there were tales told in the barrack-yards and under 
canvas of the little Amie du Drapeau that had a gentler side. 
Of how softly she would touch the w r ounded; of how deftly she 
would cure them. Of how carelessly she would dash through 
under a raking fire, to take a draught of water to a dying man. 
Of how she had sat by afei old Grenadier’s death-couch, to sing 
to him, refusing to stir, though it was a fete at Chalons, and 
she loved fetes as only a French girl can. Of how she had 
ridden twenty leagues on a saddleless Arab horse, to fetch the 
surgeon of the Spahis to a Bedouin perishing in the desert of 
shot-wounds. Of how she had sent every sou of her money to 
her mother, so long as that mother lived — a brutal, drunk, vile- 
tongued old woman, who had beaten her oftentimes, as the sole 
maternal attention, when she was but an infant. These things 
were told of Cigarette, and with a perfect truth. She was 
“ mauvais sujet, mais bon soldat,” * as she classified herself. 
Her own sex would have seen no good in her; but her com- 
rades-at-arms could and did. Of a surety, she missed virtues 
that women prize; but, not less of a surety, had she caught 
some that they miss. 

Singing her refrain, on she dashed now, swift as a greyhound, 
light as a hare ; glancing here and glancing there as she bounded 
over the picturesque desolation of the Cashbah; it was just 
noon, and there were few could brave the noon-heat as she 
* “ A thorough scamp, but a thorough soldier.” 


204 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


did; it was very still; there was only from a little distance 
the roll of the French kettle-drums where the drummers of the 
African regiments were practicing. 6 Hola ! le v’la ! ” cried 
Cigarette to herself, as her falcon-eyes darted right and left; 
and, like a chamois, she leaped down over the great masses of 
Turkish ruins, cleared the channel of a dry water-course, and 
alighted just in front of a Chasseur d’Afrique, who was sitting 
alone on a broken fragment of white marble, relic of some Moor- 
ish mosque, whose delicate columns, crowned with wind-sown 
grasses, rose behind him, against the deep intense blue of the 
cloudless sky. 

He was sitting thoughtfully enough, almost wearily, tracing 
figures in the dry sand of the soil with the point of his scab- 
bard; yet he had all the look about him of a brilliant French 
soldier, of one who, moreover, had seen hot and stern service. 
He was bronzed, but scarcely looked so after the red, brown, and 
black of the Zouaves and the Turcos, for his skin was naturally 
very fair, the features delicate, the eyes very soft — for which 
M. Tata had growled contemptuously, “ a woman’s face ” — a 
long, silken chestnut beard swept over his chest; and his figure, 
as he leaned there in the blue and scarlet and gold of the Chas- 
seurs’ uniform, with his spurred heel thrust into the sand, and 
his arm resting on his knee, was, as Cigarette’s critical eye 
told her, the figure of a superb cavalry rider; light, supple, long 
of limb, wide of chest, with every sinew and nerve firm-knit 
as links of steel. She glanced at his hands, which were very 
white, despite the sun of Algiers and the labors that fall to 
a private of Chasseurs. 

“ Beau lion ! ” * she thought, “ and noble, whatever he is.” 

But the best of blood was not new to her in the ranks of the 
Algerian regiments; she had known so many of them — those 
gilded butterflies of the Chaussee d’Antin, those lordly spend- 
thrifts of the vieille roche, who had served in the battalions 
of the demie-cavalerie, or the squadrons of the French Horse, 
to be thrust, nameless and unhonored, into a sand-hole hastily 
dug with bayonets in the hot hush of an African night. 

She woke him unceremoniously from his reverie, with a chal- 
lenge to wine. 

“ Ah, ha, mon Roumi! f Tata Leroux says you are English; 
by the faith, he must be right, or you would never sit musing 
there like an owl in the sunlight! Take a draught of my bur- 
* “ A handsome dandy.” f Soldier. 


“l’aMIE DU DKAPEAU.” 205 

gundy ; bright as rubies. I never sell bad wines — not I ! I 
know better than to drink them myself.” 

He started and rose; and, before he took the bidon,* bowed 
to her, raising his cap with a grave, courteous obeisance ; a bow 
that had used to be noted in throne-rooms for its perfection 
of grace. 

“Ah, ma belle, is it you?” he said wearily. “You do me 
much honor.” 

Cigarette gave a little petulant twist to the tap of her wine- 
barrel. She was not used to that style of salutation. She half 
liked it — half resented it. It made her wish, with an impatient 
scorn for the wish, that she knew how to read and had not her 
hair cut short like a boy’s — a weakness the little vivandiere had 
never been visited with before. 

“ Morbleu ! ” she said pettishly. “ You are too fine for us, 
mon brave. In what country, I should wonder, does one learn 
such dainty ceremony as that ? ” 

“Where should one learn courtesies, if not in France?” he 
answered wearily. He had danced with this girl-soldier the 
night before at a guinguette ball, seeing her for the first time, 
for it was almost the first time he had been in the city since 
the night when he had thrown the dice, and lost ten Napoleons 
and the Bedouins to Claude de phanrellon; but his thoughts 
were far from her in this moment. 

“ Ouf ! you have learnt carte and tierce with your tongue ! ” 
cried Cigarette, provoked to receive no more compliment than 
that. From generals and staff officers, as from drummers and 
trumpeters, she was accustomed to flattery and wooing, luscious 
as sugared chocolate, and ardent as flirtation, with a barrack 
flavor about it, commonly is; she would, as often as not, to be 
sure, finish it with the butt-end of her pistol, or the butt-end. 
of some bit of stinging sarcasm, but still, for all that, she liked 
it, and resented its omission. “ They say you are English, but 
I don’t believe it; you speak too soft, and you sound the double 
L’s too well. A Spaniard, eh? ” 

“ Do you find me so devout a Catholic that you think so? ” 
She laughed. “ A Greek, then ? ” 

“ Still worse. Have you seen me cheat at cards ? ” 

“An Austrian? You waltz like a White Coat?” 

He shook his head. 

She stamped her little foot into the ground — a foot fit for a 
* Little wooden drinking-cup. 


206 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


model, with its shapely military boot ; spurred, too, for Cigarette 
rode like a circus-rider. 

“ Becasse ! * say what you are, then, at once.” 

“ A soldier of France. Can you wish me more ? ” 

For the first time her eyes flashed and softened — her one 
love was the tricolor. 

“True!” she said simply. “But you were not always a 
soldier of France? You joined, they say, twelve years ago? 
What were you before then ? ” 

She here cast herself down in front of him, and, with her 
elbows on the sand, and her chin on her hands, watched him 
with all the frank curiosity and unmoved nonchalance imagi- 
nable, as she launched the question point-blank. 

“Before!” he said slowly. “Well — a fool.” 

“ You belonged to the majority, then ! ” said Cigarette, with 
a piquance made a thousand times more piquant by the camp 
slang she spoke in. “You should not have had to come into 
the ranks, mon ami; majorities — specially that majority — have 
very smooth sailing generally ! ” 

He looked at her more closely, though she wearied him. 

“Where have you got your ironies, Cigarette? You are so 
young.” 

She shrugged her shoulders. 

“ Bah ! one is never young, and always young in camps. 
Young? Pardieu! When I was four I could swear like a gren- 
adier, plunder like a prefet, lie like a priest, and drink like a 
bohemian.” 

Yet — with all that — and it was the truth, the brow was so 
open under the close rings of the curls, the skin so clear under 
the sun-tan, the mouth so rich and so arch in its youth ! 

“ Why did you come into the service ? ” she went on, before 
he had a chance to answer her. “ You were born in the Noblesse 
— bah! I know an aristocrat at a glance! Ceux qui ont pris 
la peine de naitre ! f — don’t you like i Figaro ’ ? My men played 
it last winter, and I was Figaro myself. Now many of those 
aristocrats come ; shoals of them ; but it is always for something. 
They all come for something; most of them have been ruined 
by the lionnes, a hundred million of francs gone in a quarter! 
Ah, bah ! what blind bats the best of you are ! They have gam- 
bled, or bet, or got into hot water, or fought too many duels, 

* Literally “ you snipe ! ” Equivalent to “ you goose ! ” 
t “ Those who have given themselves the trouble to be born ! ” 



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207 


“l’aMIE DU DRAPEAU.” 

or caused a court scandal, or something; all the aristocrats that 
come to Africa are ruined. What ruined you, M. 1’ Aristocrat ? ” 
“ Aristocrat ? I am none. I am a Corporal of the Chasseurs.” 
“ Diable ! I have known a Duke a Corporal ! What ruined 
you ? ” 

“ What ruins most men, I imagine — folly.” 

“Folly, sure enough!” retorted Cigarette, with scornful ac- 
quiescence. She had no patience with him. He danced so de- 
liciously, he looked so superb, and he would give her nothing but 
these absent answers. “ Wisdom don’t bring men who look as 
you look into the ranks of the volunteers for Africa. Besides, 
you are too handsome to be a sage ! ” 

He laughed a little. 

“ I never was one, that’s certain. And you are too pretty 
to be a cynic.” 

“ A what ? ” She did not know the word. “ Is that a good 
cigar you have? Give me one. Do women smoke in your old 
country ? ” 

“ Oh, yes — many of them.” 

“ Where is it, then ? ” 

“ I have no country — now.” 

“ But the one you had ? ” 

“ I have forgotten I ever had one.” 

“ Did it treat you ill, then ? ” 

“ Hot at all.” 

“ Had you anything you cared for in it ? ” 

“ Well— yes.” 

“ What was it ? A woman ? ” 

“ Ho — a horse.” 

He stooped his head a little as he said it, and traced more 
figures slowly in the sand. 

“ Ah!” 

She drew a short, quick breath. She understood that; she 
would only have laughed at him had it been a woman ; Cigarette 
was more veracious than complimentary in her estimate of her 
own sex. 

“ There was a man in the Cuirassiers I knew,” she went on 
softly, “ loved a horse like that ; — he would have died for Cos- 
sack; — but he was a terrible gambler, terrible. Hot but what 
I like play myself. Well, one day he played and played till he 
was mad, and everything was gone; and then in his rage he 
staked the only thing he had left. Staked and lost the horse! 


208 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


He never said a word; but he just slipped a pistol in his pocket,, 
went to the stable, kissed Cossack once — twice — thrice — and 
shot himself through the heart.” 

“ Poor fellow ! ” murmured the Chasseur d’Af rique, in his 
chestnut beard. 

Cigarette was watching him with all the keenness of her 
falcon eyes; “he has gambled away a good deal too,” she 
thought. “ It is always the same old story with them.” 

“ Your cigars are good, mon lion,” she said impatiently, as 
she sprang up ; her lithe, elastic figure in the bright vivandiere 
uniform standing out in full relief against the pearly gray of 
the ruined pillars, the vivid green of the rank vegetation, and 
the intense light of the noon. “ Your cigars are good, but it is . 
more than your company is! Ma cantche! If you had been 
as dull as this last night, I would not have danced a single turn 
with you in the cancan ! ” 

And with a bound to which indignation lent wings like a 
swallow’s, the Friend of the Flag, insulted and amazed at the 
apathy with which her advances to friendship had been re- 
ceived, dashed off at her topmost speed, singing all the louder 
out of bravado. “To have nothing more to say to me after 
dancing with me all night ! ” thought Cigarette, with fierce 
wrath at such contumely, the first neglect the pet of the Spahis 
had ever experienced. 

She was incensed, too, that she had been degraded into that 
momentary wish that she knew how to read, and looked less 
like a boy — just because a Chasseur with white hands and silent 
ways had made her a grave bow! She was more incensed still 
because she could not get at his history, and felt, despite herself,, 
a reluctance to bribe him for it with those cajoleries whose 
potency she had boasted to Tata Leroux. “ Gare a lui ! ” * mut- 
tered the soldier-coquette passionately, in her little white teeth ; 
so small and so pearly, though they had gripped a bridle tight 
before then, when each hand was filled with a pistol. “ Gare 
a lui ! If he offend me there are five hundred swords that will 
thrust civility into him, five hundred shots that will teach him 
the cost of daring to provoke Cigarette ! ” 

En route through the town her wayward way took the pretty 
brunette Friend of the Flag as many devious meanderings as 
a bird takes in a summer’s-day flight, when it stops here for 
a berry, there for a grass seed, here to dip its beak into cherries,. 

* “ Let him take care.” 



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“l’aMIE DU DKAPEAU.” 209 

there to dart after a dragon-fly, here to shake its wings in a 
brook, there to poise on a lily-bell. 

She loitered in a. thousand places, for Cigarette knew every- 
body; she chatted with a group of Turcos, she emptied her 
barrel for some Zouaves, she ate sweetmeats with a lot of negro 
boys, she boxed a little drummer’s ear for slurring over the 
“ r’lin tintin ” at his practice, she drank a demi-tasse with some 
officers at a cafe ; she had ten minutes’ pistol-shooting, where she 
beat hollow a young dandy of the Guides who had come to look 
at Algiers for a week, and made even points with one of the 
first shots of the “ Cavalerie a pied,” * as the Algerian antithesis 
runs. Finally she paused before the open French window of a 
snow-white villa, half -buried in tamarisk and orange and pome- 
granate, with the deep-hued flowers glaring in the sun, and a 
hedge of wild cactus fencing it in ; through the cactus she made 
her way as easily as a rabbit burrows; it would have been an 
impossibility to Cigarette to enter by any ordinary means; and 
balancing herself lightly on the sill for a second, stood looking 
in at the chamber. 

“ Ho, M. le Marquis ! the Zouaves have drunk all my wine 
up ; fill me my keg with yours for once — the very best burgundy, 
mind. I’m half afraid your cellar will hurt my reputation.” 

The chamber was very handsome, hung and furnished in the 
very best Paris fashion, and all glittering with amber and 
ormolu and velvets; in it half a dozen men — officers of the 
cavalry — were sitting over their noon breakfast, and playing at 
lansquenet at the same time. The table was crowded with 
dishes of every sort, and wines of every vintage; and the 
fragrance of their bouquet, the clouds of smoke, and the heavy 
scent of the orange blossom without, mingled together in an 
intense perfume. He whom she addressed, M. le Marquis de 
Chateuroy, laughed, and looked up. 

“ Ah, is it thee, my pretty brunette ? Take what thou wantest 
out of the ice pails.” 

“ Premier cru ? ” f asked Cigarette, with the dubious air and 
caution of a connoisseur. 

“ Comet ! ” said M. le Marquis, amused with the precautions 
taken with his cellar, one of the finest in Algiers. “ Come in 
and have some breakfast, ma belle. Only pay the toll.” 

* Literally “Horse-Foot” ; a name given to the Zephyrs and Zouaves for 
their excessive swiftness of limb. 

f The best growths ? 


210 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


Where he sat between the window and the table he caught 
her in his arms and drew her pretty face down ; Cigarette, with 
the laugh of a saucy child, whisked her cigar out of her mouth, 
and blew a great cloud of smoke in his eyes. She had no par- 
ticular fancy for him, though she had for his wines; shouts 
of mirth from the other men completed the Marquis’ discom- 
fiture, as she swayed away from him, and went over to the 
other side of the table, emptying some bottles unceremoniously 
into her wine-keg; iced, ruby, perfumy claret that she could 
not have bought anywhere for the barracks. 

“ Hola ! ” cried the Marquis, “ thou art not generally so coy 
with thy kisses, petite.” 

Cigarette tossed her head. 

“I don’t like bad clarets after good! I’ve just been with 
your Corporal, ‘ Bel-a-faire-peur ’ ; you are no beauty after him, 
M. le Colonel.” 

Chateauroy’s face darkened; he was a colossal-limbed man, 
whose bone was iron, and whose muscles were like oak-fibers; 
he had a dark, keen head like an eagle’s; the brow narrow, but 
very high, looking higher because the close-cut hair was worn 
off the temples; thin lips hidden by heavy curling mustaches, 
and a skin burned black by long African service. Still he was 
fairly handsome enough not to have muttered so heavy an oath 
as he did at the vivandiere’s jest. * 

“ Sacre bleu ! I wish my corporal were shot ! one can never 
hear the last of him.” 

Cigarette darted a quick glance at him. “ Oh, ho ; jealous, 
mon brave ! ” thought her quick wits. “ And why, I wonder ? ” 

“You haven’t a finer soldier in your Chasseurs, mon cher; 
don’t wish him shot, for the good of the service,” said the Vis- 
count de Chanrellon, who had now a command of his own in 
the Light Cavalry of Algiers. “ Pardieu ! if I had to choose 
whether I’d be backed by 1 Bel-a-faire-peur,’ or by six other 
men in a skirmish, I’d choose him, and risk the odds.” 

Chateauroy tossed off his burgundy with a contemptuous im- 
patience. 

“ Diable ! that is the galamatias * one always hears about this 
fellow — as if he were a second Boland, or a revivified Bayard ! 
I see nothing particular in him, except that he’s too fine a gen- 
tleman for the ranks.” 

“Fine? ah!” laughed Cigarette. “He made me a bow this 
* Exaggerated nonsense. 


211 


“l’aMIE DU DRAPEAU.” 

morning like a court chamberlain; and his beard is like carded 
silk, and he has such woman’s hands, mon Dieu! But he is a 
croc-mitaine, too.” 

“ Rather ! ” laughed Claude de Chanrellon, as magnificent 
a soldier himself as ever crossed swords. “ I said he would eat 
fire the very minute he played that queer game at dice with me 
years ago. I wish I had him instead of you, Chateauroy; like 
lightning in a charge ; and yet the very man for a dangerous bit 
of secret service that wants the softness of a panther. We all 
let our tongues go too much, but he says so little — just a word 
here, a word there — when one’s wanted — no more; and he’s the 
devil’s own to fight.” 

The Marquis heard the praise of his Corporal, knitting his 
heavy brows; it was evident the private was no favorite with 
him. 

“ The fellow rides well enough,” he said, with an affectation 
of carelessness ; “ there — for what I see — is the end of his mar- 
vels. I wish you had him, Claude, with all my soul.” 

“ Oh, he ! ” cried Chanrellon, wiping the Rhenish off his 
tawny mustaches, “ he should have been a captain by this if I 
had. Morbleu! he is a splendid sabreur — kills as many men to 
his own sword as I could myself, when it comes to a hand-to- 
hand fight; breaks horses in like magic; rides them like the 
wind; has a hawk’s eye over open country; obeys like clock- 
work ; what more can you want ? ” 

“ Obeys ! yes ! ” said the Colonel of Chasseurs, with a snarl. 
“ He’d obey without a word if you ordered him to walk up to 
a cannon’s mouth, and be blown from it; but he gives you such 

a d d languid grand seigneur * glance as he listens that one 

would think he commanded the regiment.” 

“ But he’s very popular with your men, too ? ” 

“ Monsieur, the worst quality a corporal can have. His idea 
of maintaining discipline is to treat them to cognac and give 
them tobacco.” 

“ Pardieu! not a bad way, either, with our French fire-eaters. 
II connalt son monde; ce brave.* Your squadrons would go to 
the devil after him.” 

The Colonel gave a grim laugh. 

“ I dare say nobody knows the way better.” 

Cigarette, flirting with the other officers, drinking champagne 

* Fine gentleman. 

f “ He knows them he has to deal with,— that brave fellow.” 


212 


ILNT)ER TWO FLAGS. 


by great glassfuls, eating bonbons from one, sipping another’s 
soup, pulling the limbs of a succulent ortolan to pieces with 
a relish, and devouring truffles with all the zest of a bon-vivant, 
did not lose a word, and catching the inflection of Chateauroy’s 
voice, settled with her own thoughts that “ Bel-a-faire-peur ” 
had not a fair field or a smooth course with his Colonel. The 
weather-cock heart of the little “Friend of the Flag” veered 
round, with her sex’s common custom, to the side that was the 
weakest. 

“Dieu de Dieu, M. le Colonel!” she cried, while she ate 
M. le Colonel’s foie gras with as little ceremony and as much 
enjoyment as would be expected from a young plunderer ac- 
customed to think a meal all the better spiced by being stolen 
“ by the rules of war ”— “ whatever else your handsome Corporal 
is, he is an aristocrat. Ah, ha! I know the aristocrats — I do! 
Their touch is so gentle, and their speech is so soft, and they 
have no slang of the camp, and yet they are such diablotins 
to fight and eat steel, and die laughing, all so quiet and non- 
chalant. Give me the aristocrats — the real thing, you know. 
Not the ginger-cakes, just gilt, that are ashamed of being 
honest bread — but the old blood like Bel-a-faire-peur.” 

The Colonel laughed, but restlessly; the little ingrate had 
aimed at a sore point in him. He was of the First Empire 
Nobility, and he was weak enough, though a fierce, dauntless, 
iron-nerved soldier, to be discontented with the great fact that 
his father had been a hero of the Army of Italy, and scarce 
inferior in genius to Massena, because impatient of the minor 
one that, before strapping on a knapsack to have his first taste 
of war under Custine, the Marshal had been but a postilion 
at a posting inn in the heart of the Nivernais. 

“ Ah, my brunette ! ” he answered with a rough laugh, “ have 
you taken my popular Corporal for your lover? You should 
give your old friends warning first, or he may chance to get 
an ugly spit on a saber.” 

The Amie du Drapeau tossed off her sixth glass of champagne. 
She felt for the first time in her life a flush of hot blood on her 
brown, clear cheek, well used as she was to such jests and such 
lovers as these. 

“ Ma foi ! ” she said coolly. “ He would be more likely to 
spit than be spitted if it came to a duel. I should like to see 
him in a duel; there is not a prettier sight in the world when 
both men have science. As for fighting for me! Morbleu! I 



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213 


“l’aMIE DU DRAPEAU.” 

will thank nobody to have the impudence to do it, unless I order 
them out. Coqueline got shot for me, you remember; he was 
a pretty fellow, Coqueline, and they killed him so clumsily, that 
they disfigured him terribly — it was quite a pity. I said then 
I would have no more handsome men fight about me. You may, 
if you like, M. le Faucon Noir.” * 

Which title she gave with a saucy laugh, hitting with a 
chocolate bonbon the black African-burnt visage of the omnipo- 
tent chief she had the audacity to attack. High or low, they 
were all the same to Cigarette. She would have “ slanged ” the 
Emperor himself with the self-same coolness, and the Army 
had given her a passport of immunity so wide that it would 
have fared ill with anyone who had ever attempted to bring 
the vivandiere to book for her uttermost mischief. 

“ By the way ! ” she went on, quick as thought, with her reck- 
less, devil-may-care gayety. “One thing! Your Corporal will 
demoralize the Army of Africa, m’sieu ! ” 

“ Eh ? He shall have an ounce of cold lead before he does. 
What in ? ” 

“ He will demoralize it,” said Cigarette, with a sagacious 
shake of her head. “ If they follow his example we shan’t have 
a Chasseur, or a Spahi, or a Piou-piou, or a Sapeur worth any- 
thing ” 

“ Sacre ! What does he do ? ” The Colonel’s strong teeth 
bit savagely through his cigar; he would have given much to 
have been able to find a single thing of insubordination or 
laxity of duty in a soldier who irritated and annoyed him, but 
who obeyed him implicitly, and was one of the most brilliant 
u fire-eaters ” of his regiment. 

“ He won’t only demoralize the army,” pursued Cigarette, 
with vivacious eloquence, “ but if his example is followed, he’ll 
ruin the Prefets, close the Bureaux, destroy the Exchequer, 
beggar all the officials, make African life as tame as milk and 
water, and rob you, M. le Colonel, of your very highest and 
dearest privilege ! ” 

“ Sacre bleu ! ” cried her hearers, as their hands instinctively 
sought their swords ; “ what does he do ? ” 

Cigarette looked at them out of her arch black lashes. 

“ Why, he never thieves from the Arabs ! If the fashion come 
in, adieu to our occupation. Court-martial him, Colonel ! ” 
With which sally Cigarette thrust her pretty soft curls back 
* Black Hawk. 


214 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


off her temples, and launched herself into lansquenet with all 
the ardor of a gambler and the vivacity of a child; her eyes 
flashing, her cheeks flushing, her little teeth set, her whole soul* 
in the whirl of the game, made all the more riotous by the peals 
of laughter from her comrades and the wines that were washed 
down like water. Cigarette was a terrible little gamester, and 
had gaming made very easy to her, for it was the creed of the 
Army that her losses never counted, but her gains were paid 
to her often double or treble. Indeed, so well did she play, 
and so well did the goddess of hazard favor her, that she might 
have grown a millionaire on the fruits of her dice and her cards, 
but for this fact, that whatever the little Friend of the Flag 
had in her hands one hour was given away the next, to the 
first wounded soldier, or ailing veteran, or needy Arab woman 
that required the charity. 

As much gold was showered on her as on Isabel of the Jockey 
Club ; but Cigarette was never the richer for it. “ Bah ! ” she 
would say, when they told her of her heedlessness, “ money is 
like a mill, no good standing still. Let it turn, turn, turn, as 
fast as ever it can, and the more bread will come from it for 
the people to eat.” 

The vivandiere was by instinct a fine political economist. 

Meanwhile, where she had left him among the stones of the 
ruined mosque, the Chasseur, whom they nicknamed Bel-a- 
faire-peur, in a double sense, because of his “ woman’s face,” 
as Tata Leroux termed it, and because of the terror his sword 
had become through North Africa, sat motionless with his right 
arm resting on his knee, and his spurred heel thrust into the 
sand; the sun shining down unheeded in its fierce, burning 
glare on the chestnut masses of his beard and the bright glitter 
of his uniform. 

He was a dashing cavalry soldier, who had had a dozen 
wounds cut over his body by the Bedouin swords, in many and 
hot skirmishes; who had waited through sultry African nights 
for the lion’s tread, and had fought the desert-king and con- 
quered; who had ridden a thousand miles over the great sand 
waste, and the boundless arid plains, and slept under the stars 
with the saddle beneath his head, and his rifle in his hand, all 
through the night; who had served, and served well, in fierce, 
arduous, unremitting work, in trying campaigns and in close 
discipline; who had blent the verve, the brilliance, the daring, 


215 


“l’aMIE DU DRAPEAU.” 

the eat-drink-and-enjoy-for-to-morrow-we-die of the French 
Chasseur, with something that was very different, and much 
more tranquil. 

Yet, though as bold a man as any enrolled in the French 
Service, he sat alone here in the shadow of the column, thought- 
ful, motionless, lost in silence. 

In his left hand was a Galignani, six months old, and his eyes 
rested on a line in the obituary: 

“ On the 10th ult., at Royallieu, suddenly, the Right Hon. 
Denzil, Viscount Royallieu; aged 90.” 


CHAPTER XVI. 


CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE. 

Vanitas vanitatum! The dust of death lies over the fallen 
altars of Bubastis, where once all Egypt came down the flood 
of glowing Nile, and Herodotus mused under the shadowy foli- 
age, looking on the lake-like rings of water. The Temple of 
the Sun, where the beauty of Asenath beguiled the Israelite to 
forget his sale into bondage and banishment, lies in shapeless 
hillocks, over which canter the mules of dragomen and chatter 
the tongues of tourists. Where the Lutetian Palace of Julian 
saw the Legions rush, with torches and with wine-bowls, to 
salute their darling as Augustus, the sledge-hammer and the 
stucco of the Haussmann fiat bear desolation in their wake. 
Levantine dice are rattled where Hypatia’s voice was heard. 
Bills of exchange are trafficked in where Cleopatra wandered 
under the palm aisles of her rose gardens. Drummers roll their 
caserne-calls where Drusus fell and Sulla laid down dominion. 

And here — in the land of Hannib'al, in the conquest of Scipio, 
in the Phoenicia whose loveliness used to flash in the burning, 
sea-mirrored sun, while her fleets went eastward and westward 
for the honey of Athens and the gold of Spain — here Cigarette 
danced the cancan! 

An auberge * of the barriere swung its sign of the As de 
Pique where feathery palms once had waved above mosques 
of snowy gleam, with marble domes and jeweled arabesques, 
and the hush of prayer under columned aisles. “ Debits de vin, 
liqueurs, et tabac,” * was written where once verses of the 
Koran had been blazoned by reverent hands along porphyry 
cornices and capitals of jasper. A Cafe Chantant reared its 
impudent little roof where once, far back in the dead cycles, 
Phoenician warriors had watched the galleys of the gold-haired 
favorite of the gods bear down to smite her against whom the 
one unpardonable sin of rivalry to Rome was quoted. 

The riot of a Paris guinguette was heard where once the 
tent of Belisarius might have been spread above the majestic 
head that towered in youth above the tempestuous seas of 
* Little hostelry. f Here are sold wine, liquor and tobacco. 

216 



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CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE. 


217 


Gothic armies, as when, silvered with age, it rose as a rock 
against the on-sweeping flood of Bulgarian hordes. The grisette 
charms of little tobacconists, milliners, flower-girls, lemonade- 
sellers, bonbon-sellers, and filles de joie flaunted themselves in 
the gaslight where the lustrous sorceress eyes of Antonina might 
have glanced over the Afric Sea, while her wanton’s heart, so 
strangely filled with leonine courage and shameless license, hero- 
ism and brutality, cruelty and self-devotion, swelled under the 
purples of her delicate vest, at the glory of the man she at once 
dishonored and adored. 

Vanitas vanitatum! Under the thirsty soil, under the ill- 
paved streets, under the arid turf, the Legions lay dead, with 
the Carthaginians they had borne down under the mighty pres- 
sure of. their phalanx ; and the Byzantine ranks were dust, side 
by side with the soldiers of Gelimer. And here, above the 
graves of two thousand centuries, the little light feet of Ciga- 
rette danced joyously in that triumph of the Living, who never 
remember that they also are dancing onward to the tomb. 

It was a low-roofed, white-plastered, gaudily decked, smoke- 
dried mimicry of the guinguettes beyond Paris. The long room, 
that was an imitation of the Salle de Mars on a Lilliputian 
scale, had some bunches of lights flaring here and there, and 
had its walls adorned with laurel wreaths, stripes of tri-colored 
paint, vividly colored medallions of the Second Empire, and 
a little pink gauze flourished about it, that flashed into bright- 
ness under the jets of flame — trumpery, yet trumpery which, 
thanks to the instinct of the French esprit, harmonized and did 
not vulgarize; a gift French instinct alone possesses. The floor 
was bare and well polished ; the air full of tobacco smoke, wine 
fumes, brandy odors, and an overpowering scent of oil, garlic, 
and pot au feu. Biotous music pealed through it, that even in 
its clamor kept a certain silvery ring, a certain rhythmical 
cadence. Pipes were smoked, barrack clang, camp slang, bar- 
riere slang, temple slang, were chattered volubly. Theresa’s 
songs were sung by bright-eyed, sallow-cheeked Parisiennes, and 
chorused by the lusty lungs of Zouaves and Turcos. Good hu- 
mor prevailed, though of a wild sort; the mad gallop of the 
Rigolboche had just flown round the room, like lightning, to 
the crash and the tumult of the most headlong music that ever 
set spurred heels stamping and grisettes’ heels flying; and now, 
where the crowds of soldiers and women stood back to leave her 
a clear place, Cigarette was dancing alone. 


218 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


She had danced the cancan; she had danced since sunset; 
she had danced till she had tired out cavalrymen, who could go 
days and nights in the saddle without a sense of fatigue, and 
made Spahis cry quarter* who never gave it by any chance in 
the battlefield; and she was dancing now like a little Bac- 
chante, as fresh as if she had just sprung up from a long sum- 
mer day’s rest. Dancing as she would dance only now and then, 
when caprice took her, and her wayward vivacity was at its 
height, on the green space before a tent full of general officers, 
on the bare floor of a barrack-room, under the canvas of a fete- 
day’s booth, or as here, in the music-hall of a Cafe. 

Marshals had more than once essayed to bribe the famous 
little Friend of the Flag to dance for them, and had failed; 
but, for a set of soldiers — war-worn, dust-covered, weary with 
toil and stiff with wounds — she would do it till they forgot their 
ills and got as intoxicated with it as with champagne. For her 
gros bebees, if they were really in want of it, she would do 
anything. She would flout a star-covered general, box the ears 
of a brilliant aid, send killing missiles of slang at a dandy of 
a regiment de famille, and refuse point-blank a Russian grand 
duke ; but to “ mes enf ants,” as she was given to Calling the 
rough tigers and grisly veterans, of the Army of Africa, 
Cigarette was never capricious ; however mischievously she 
would rally, or contemptuously would rate them, when they 
deserved it. 

And she was dancing for them now. 

Her soft, short curls all fluttering, her cheeks all bright with 
a scarlet flush, her eyes as black as night and full of fire; her 
gay little uniform, with its scarlet and purple, making her look 
like a fuchsia bell tossed by the wind to and fro, ever so lightly, 
on its delicate, swaying stem; Cigarette danced with the wild 
grace of an Almeh, of a Bayadere, of a Nautch girl — as un- 
tutored and instinctive in her as its song to a bird, as its swift- 
ness to a chamois. To see Cigarette was like drinking light, 
fiery wines, whose intoxication was gay as mischief, and spark- 
ling as themselves. All the warmth of Africa, all the wit of 
France, all the bohemianism of the Flag, all the caprices of her 
sex, were in that bewitching dancing. Flashing, fluttering, 
circling, whirling; glancing like a saber’s gleam, tossing like a 
flower’s head, bounding like an antelope, launching like an ar- 
row, darting like a falcon, skimming like a swallow; then for an 
instant resting as indolently, as languidly, as voluptuously, as 


CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE. 219 

a water-lily rests on the water’s breast — Cigarette en Bacchante 
no man could resist. 

When once she abandoned herself to the afflatus of that 
dance delirium, she did with her beholders what she would. 
The famous Cachucha, that made the reverend cardinals of 
Spain fling off their pontifical vestments, and surrender them- 
selves to the witchery of the castanets and the gleam of the 
white, twinkling feet, was never more irresistible, more en- 
chanting, more full of wild, soft, bizarre, delicious grace. It 
was a poem of motion and color, an ode to Venus and Bacchus. 

All her heart was in it — that heart of a girl and a soldier, 
of a hawk and a kitten, of a Bohemian and an epicurean, of 
a Lascar and a child, which beat so brightly and so boldly under 
the dainty gold aiglettes, with which she laced her dashing little 
uniform. 

In the Chambree of Zephyrs, among the Douars of Spahis, 
on sandy soil under African stars, above the heaped plunder 
brought in from a razzia, in the yellow light of candles fas- 
tened to bayonets stuck in the earth at a bivouac, on the broad 
deal table of a barrack-room full of black-browed consents in- 
digenes,* amid the thundering echoes of the Marseillaise des 
Bataillons shouted from the brawny chests of Zouaves, Ciga- 
rette had danced, danced, danced; till her whole vivacious life 
seemed pressed into one hour, and all the mirth and mischief 
of her little brigand’s soul seemed to have found their utter- 
ance in those tiny, slender, spurred, and restless feet, that 
never looked to touch the earth which they lit on lightly as a 
bird alights, only to leave it afresh, with wider, swifter bound, 
with ceaseless, airy flight. 

So she danced now, in the cabaret of the As de Pique. She 
had a famous group of spectators, not one of whom knew how 
to hold himself back from springing in to seize her in his arms, 
and whirl with her down the floor. But it had been often told 
them by experience that, unless she beckoned one out, a blow 
of her clinched hand and a cessation of her impromptu pas de 
seul would be the immediate result. Her spectators were re- 
nowned croc-mitaines ; men whose names rang like trumpets 
in the ear of Kabyle and Marabout ; men who had fought under 
the noble colors of the day of Mazagran, or had cherished or 
emulated its traditions; men who had the salient features of 
all the varied species that make up the soldiers of Africa. 

* Conscripts drawn from the native population. 


220 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


There was Ben Arslan, with his crimson burnous wrapped 
round his towering stature, from whom Moor and Jew fled, as 
before a pestilence — the fiercest, deadliest, most voluptuous of 
all the Spahis ; * brutalized in his drink, merciless in his loves ; 
all an Arab when once back in the desert; with a blow of a 
scabbard his only payment for forage, and a thrust of his saber 
his only apology to husbands; but to the service a slave, and 
in the combat a lion. 

There was Beau-Bruno, a dandy of Turcos, f whose snowy 
turban and olive beauty bewitched half the women of Algeria; 
who himself affected to neglect his conquests, with a supreme 
contempt for those indulgences, but who would have been led 
out and shot rather than forego the personal adornings for 
which his adjutant and his capitaine du bureau growled unceas- 
ing wrath at him with every day that shone. 

There was Pouffer-de-Bire, a little Tringlo, J the wittiest, gay- 
est, happiest, sunniest-tempered droll in all the army ; who would 
sing the camp-songs so joyously through a burning march that 
the whole of the battalions would break into one refrain as 
with one throat, and press on laughing, shouting, running, heed- 
less of thirst, or heat, or famine, and as full of monkey-like 
jests as any gamins. 

There was En-ta-maboull, § so nicknamed from his love for 
that unceremonious slang phrase — a Zouave who had the his- 
tory of a Gil Bias and the talent of a Crichton; the morals 
of an Abruzzi brigand and the wit of a F alstaff ; aquiline-nosed, 
eagle-eyed, black-skinned as an African, with adventures enough 
in his life to outvie Munchausen; with a purse always pleine 
de vide, || as the camp sentence runs ; who thrust his men through 
the body as coolly as others kill wasps; who roasted a shepherd 
over a camp-fire for contumacy in concealing Bedouin where- 
abouts ; yet who would pawn his last shirt at the bazaar to help 
a comrade in debt, and had once substituted himself for, and 
received fifty blows on the loins in the stead of his sworn 
friend, whom he loved with that love of David for Jonathan 
which, in Caserne life, is readier found than in Club life. 

There was Pattes-du-Tigre, a small, wiry, supple-limbed fire- 
eater, with a skin like a coal and eyes that sparkled like the 
live coal’s flame; a veteran of the Joyeux; who could discipline 

* Arab cavalry. f Native infantry. 

% Soldier of the commissariat and of the baggage-trains. 

§ “ Est-ce-que-tu es fou ? ” in ordinary French. || Penniless. 


i 


CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE. 


221 


his roughs as a sheepdog his lambs, and who had one curt mar- 
tial law for his detachment; brief as Draco’s, and trimmed to 
suit either an attack on the enemy or the chastisement of an 
indiscipline,* lying in one simple word — “ Fusillez.” f 

There was Barbe-Grise, a grisly ancien J of Zephyrs, who 
held the highest repute of any in his battalion for rushing on to 
a foe with a foot speed that could equal the canter of an Arab’s 
horse ; for having stood alone once the brunt of thirty Bedouins’ 
attack, and ended by beating them back, though a dozen spear- 
heads were launched into his body and his pantalons garances 
were filled with his own blood; and for framing a matchless 
system of night plunder that swept the country bare as a table- 
rock in an hour, and made the colons surrender every hidden 
treasure, from a pot of gold to a hen’s eggs, from a caldron of 
couscoussou to a tom-cat. 

There was Alcide Eehauffourees, also a Zephyr, § who had his 
nickname from the marvelous changes of costume with which 
he would pursue his erratic expedition, and deceive the very 
Arabs themselves into believing him a born Mussulman; a very 
handsome fellow, the Lauzun of his battalion, the Brummel of 
his Caserne; coquette with his kepi on one side of his graceful 
head, and his mustaches soft as a lady’s hair; whose paradise 
was a score of dangerous intrigues, and whose seventh heaven 
was a duel with an infuriated husband; incorrigibly lazy, but 
with the Italian laziness, as of the panther who sleeps in the 
sun, and with such episodes of romance, mischief, love, and 
deviltry in his twenty-five years of existence as would leave 
behind them all the invention of Dumas, pere ou fils. 

All these and many more like them were the spectators of 
Cigarette’s ballet ; applauding with the wild hurrah of the 
desert, with the clashing of spurs, with the thunder of feet, with 
the demoniac shrieks of irrepressible adoration and delight. 

And every now and then her bright eyes would flash over the 
ring of familiar faces, and glance from them with an impatient 
disappointment as she danced ; her gros bebees were not enough 
for her. She wanted a Chasseur with white hands and a grave 
smile to be among them; and she shook back her curls, and 
flushed angrily as she noted his absence, and went on with the 
pirouettes, the circling flights, the wild, resistless abandonment 
of her inspirations, till she was like a little desert -hawk that 

* A mutineer. t Fire ! J Veteran. 

§ Zephyr is a name given to the “Battalion of the Rebellious ” in Algeria. 


t 


222 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


is intoxicated with the scent of prey borne down upon the wind, 
and wheeling like a mad thing in the transparent ether and the 
hot sun-glow. 

L’As de Pique was the especial estaminet of the chasses- 
marais. He was in the house; she knew it; had she not seen 
him drinking with some others, or rather paying for all, but 
taking little himself, just as she entered? He was in the house, 
this mysterious Bel-a-faire-peur — and was not here to see her 
dance! Not here to see the darling of the Douars; the pride 
of every Chacal, Zephyr, and Chasseur in Africa; the Amie du 
Drapeau, who was adored by everyone, from Chefs de Ba- 
taillons to fantassins, and toasted by every drinker, from Al- 
giers to Oran, in the Champagne of Messieurs les Generaux 
as in the Cric of the Loustics round a camp-fire! 

He was not there; he was leaning over the little wooden 
ledge of a narrow window in an inner room, from which, one 
by one, some Spahis and some troopers of his own tribu,* with 
whom he had just been drinking such burgundies and brandies 
as the place could give, had sloped away, one by one, under 
the irresistible attraction of the vivandiere. An attraction, 
however, that had not seduced them till all the bottles were 
emptied ; bottles more in numbed and higher in cost than was 
prudent in a corporal who had but his pay, and that scant 
enough to keep himself, and who had known what it was to find 
a roll of white bread and a cup of coffee a luxury beyond all 
reach, and to have to faire la lessive f up to the last thing in 
his haversack to buy a toss of thin wine when he was dying 
of thirst, or a slice of melon when he was parching with African 
fever. 

But prudence had at no time been his specialty, and the 
reckless life of Algeria was not one to teach it, with its frank, 
brotherly fellowship that bound the soldiers of each battalion, 
or each squadron, so closely in a fraternity of which every 
member took as freely as he gave; its gay, careless carpe diem 
camp-philosophy — the unconscious philosophy of men who en- 
joyed, heart and soul, if they had a chance, because they knew 
they might be shot dead before another day broke; and its 
swift and vivid changes that made tirailleurs and troopers one 
hour rich as a king in loot, in wine, in dark-eyed captives at 
the sacking of a tribe, to be the next day famished, scorched, 
dragging their weary limbs, or urging their sinking horses 
* Squadron. tSell his whole effects. 


CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE. 


223 


through endless sand and burning heat, glad to sell a cartouche 
if they dared so break regimental orders, or to rifle a hen- 
roost if they came near one, to get a mouthful of food; chang- 
ing everything in their haversack for a sup of dirty water, and 
driven to pay with the thrust of a saber for a lock of wretched 
grass to keep their beasts alive through the sickliness of a 
sirocco. 

All these taught no caution to any nature normally without 
it ; and the chief thing that his regiment had loved in him whom 
they named Bel-a-faire-peur from the first day that he had 
bound his red waist-sash about his loins, and the officers of the 
bureau had looked over the new volunteer, murmuring admir- 
ingly in their teeth “ Ce gaillard ira loin ! ” * had been that all 
he had was given, free as the winds, to any who asked or needed. 

The all was slender enough. Unless he live by the ingenuity 
of his own manufactures, or by thieving or intimidating the 
people of the country, a French soldier has but barren fare and 
a hard struggle with hunger and poverty; and it was the one 
murmur against him, when he was lowest in the ranks, that 
he would never follow the fashion, in wringing out by force or 
threat the possessions of the native population. The one re- 
proach, that made his fellow-lascars f impatient and suspicious 
of him, was that he refused any share in those rough argu- 
ments of blows and lunges with which they were accustomed to 
persuade every victim they came nigh to yield them up all such 
treasures of food, or drink, or riches, from sheep’s liver and 
couscoussou, to Morocco carpets and skins of brandy and coins 
hid in the sand, that the Arabs might be so unhappy as to own 
in their reach. That the fattest pullet of the poorest Bedouin 
was as sacred to him as the banquet of his own Chef d’Es- 
cadron, let him be ever so famished after the longest day’s 
march, was an eccentricity, and an insult to the usages of the 
corps, for which not even his daring and his popularity could 
wholly procure him pardon. 

But this defect in him was counterbalanced by the lavishness 
with which his decompte J was lent, given, or spent in the very 
moment of its receipt. If a man of his tribu wanted anything, 
he knew that Bel-a-faire-peur would offer his last sous to aid 
him, or, if money were all gone, would sell the last trifle he 
possessed to the Riz-pain-sels, § to get enough to assist his com- 

* “ This gallant will do great things ! ” f Soldiers. 

\ Pay. § Working-soldiers of the administration. 


224 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


rade. It was a virtue which went far to vouch for all others 
in the view of his lawless, open-handed brethren of the Cham- 
bree* and the Camp, and made them forgive him many mo- 
ments when the mood of silence and the habit of solitude, not 
uncommon with him, would otherwise have incensed a fraternity 
with whom “ tu f ais suisse ! ” f is the deadliest charge, and the 
sentence of excommunication against any who dare to pro- 
voke it. 

One of those moods was on him. now. 

He had had a drinking bout with the men who had left him, 
and had laughed as gayly and as carelessly, if not as riotously, 
as any of them at the wild mirth, the unbridled license, the 
amatory recitations, and the Bacchic odes in their lawless sapir, 
that had ushered the night in while his wines unlocked the 
tongues and flowed down the throats of the fierce Arab-Spahis 
and the French cavalrymen. But now he leaned out of the 
pent-up casement, with his arms folded on the sill and a short 
pipe in his teeth, thoughtful and solitary after the orgy whose 
heavy fumes and clouds of smoke still hung heavily on the 
air within. 

The window looked on a little, dull, close courtyard, where 
the yellow leaves of a withered gourd trailed drearily over the 
gray, uneven stones. The clamor of the applause and the ring 
of the music from the dancing-hall echoed with a whirling din 
in his ear, and made in sharper, stranger contrast the quiet of 
the narrow court with its strip of starry sky above its four high 
walls. 

He leaned there musing and grave, hearing little of the noise 
about him; there was always noise of some sort in the clangor 
and tumult of barrack or bivouac life, and he had grown to 
heed it no more than he heeded the roar of desert beasts about 
him, when he slept in the desert or the hills, but looked dream- 
ily out at the little shadowy square, with the sear gourd leaves 
and the rough, misshapen stones. His present and his future 
were neither much brighter than the gloomy, walled-in den on 
which he gazed. 

Twelve years before, when he had been ordered into the 
champ de manoeuvre \ for the first time, to see of what mettle he 
was made, the instructor had watched him with amazed eyes, 
muttering to himself, “Tiens! ce n’est pas un ‘bleu’ — ceci! § 

* Sleeping-room in a barrack. f “You live alone, or apart.” 

X Exercise-ground. § “ Whew ! This is no raw recruit,— this fellow! 





Photo by Byron 








CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE. 


225 


What a rider! Dieu de Dieu! he knows more than we can 
teach. He has served before now — served in some emperor’s 
picked guard ! ” 

And when he had passed from the exercising-ground to the 
campaign, the Army had found in him one of the most splendid 
of its many splendid soldiers ; and in the folios matricules * 
there was no page of achievements, of exploits, of services, of 
dangers, that showed a more brilliant array of military deserts 
than his. Yet, for many years, he had been passed by unno- 
ticed. He had now not even the cross on his chest, and he had 
only slowly and with infinite difficulty been promoted so far 
as he stood now — a Corporal in the Chasseurs d’Afrique — a step 
only just accorded him because wounds innumerable and dis- 
tinctions without number in countless skirmishes had made 
it impossible to cast him wholly aside any longer. 

The cause lay in the implacable enmity of one man — his 
Chief. 

Far-sundered as they were by position, and rarely as they 
could come in actual contact, that merciless weight of animosity 
from the great man to his soldier had lain on the other like 
iron, and clogged him from all advancement. His thoughts 
were of it now. Only to-day, at an inspection, the accidentally 
broken saddle-girth of a boy-conscript had furnished pretext for 
a furious reprimand, a volley of insolent opprobrium hurled 
at himself, under which he had had to sit mute in his saddle, 
with no other sign that he was human beneath the outrage than 
the blood that would, despite himself, flush the pale bronze 
of his forehead. His thoughts were on it now. 

“There are many losses that are bitter enough,” he mused; 
“ but there is not one so bitter as the loss of the right to 
resent ! ” 

A whirlwind of laughter, so loud that it drowned the music 
of the shrill violins and thundering drums, echoed through the 
rooms and shook him from his reverie. 

“ They are bons enfants,” he thought, with a half smile, as 
he listened; “they are more honest in their mirth, as in their 
wrath, than we ever were in that old world of mine.” 

Amid the shouts, the crash, the tumult, the gay, ringing voice 
of Cigarette rose distinct. She had apparently paused in her 
dancing to exchange one of those passes of arms which were 


* Daily register of the troopers’ conduct. 


226 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


her specialty, in the Sabir that she, a child of the regiments 
of Africa, had known as her mother tongue. 

“ II fait suisse ? ” she cried disdainfully. “ Paf ! et tu as bu 
de sa gourde, chenapan ? ” * 

The grumbled assent of the accused was inaudible. 

“ Ingrat ! ” pursued the scornful, triumphant voice of the 
Vivandiere; “you would bazarder \ your mother’s grave- 
clothes ! You would eat your children, en fricassee ! You would 
sell your father’s bones for a draught of tord-boyaud! J Ya 
t’en, chien ! ” 

The screams of mirth redoubled; Cigarette’s style of wither- 
ing eloquence was suited to all her auditors’ tastes, and under 
the chorus of laughs at his cost, her infuriated adversary 
plucked up courage and roared forth a defiance. 

“ Ma cantche ! white hands and a brunette’s face are fine 
things for a soldier. He kills women — he kills women with his 
lady’s grace ! Grand’ chose ga ! ” 

“He does not pull their ears to make them give him their 
style, § and beat them with a matraque || if they don’t fry his 
eggs fast enough, as you do, Barbe-Grise,” retorted the con- 
temptuous tones of the champion of the absent. “ White hands, 
morbleu! Well, his hands are not always in other people’s 
pockets as yours are, sacripant! 

This forcible tu quoque recrimination is in high relish in the 
Caserne; the screams of mirth redoubled. Barbe-Grise was 
a redoubtable authority whom the wildest dare-devil in his 
brigade dared not contradict, and he was getting the worst of 
it under the lash of Cigarette’s tongue, to the infinite glee of 
the whole ballroom. 

“ Dame ! — his hands cannot work as mine can ! ” growled 
her opponent. 

“ Oh, ho ! ” cried the little lady, with supreme disdain ; “ they 
don’t twist cocks’ throats and skin rabbits they have thieved, 
perhaps, like yours; but they would wring your neck before 
breakfast to get an appetite, if they could touch such canaille.’’ 

“ Canaille ? ” thundered the insulted Barbe-Grise. “ Ma 
cantche ! if you were but a man ! ” 

“ What would you do to me, brigand ? ” screamed Cigarette, 
in fits of laughter. “ Give me fifty blows of a matraque, as 

* “ You call him a misanthrope ? aud you have been drinking at his expense, 
you rascal ? ” 

f Pawn. t Brandy. § Money. 1 Stick. 


CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE. 227 

your officers gave you last week for stealing his jambon * from 
the blanc-bec ? ” f 

A growl like a lion’s from the badgered Barbe-Grise shook 
the walls ; she had cast her mischievous stroke at him on a very 
sore point; the unhappy young conscript’s rifle having been 
first dexterously thieved from him, and then as dexterously 
sold to an Arab. 

“ Sacre bleu ! ” he roared ; “ you are in love, au grand galop, 
with this Vainqueur des belles J— this loustic aristocrat !” § 

The only answer to this unbearable insult was a louder 
tumult of laughter ; a crash, a splash, and a volley of oaths from 
Barbe-Grise. Cigarette had launched a bottle of vin ordinaire 
at him, blinded his eyes, and drenched his beard with the red 
torrent and the shower of glass shivers, and was back again 
dancing like a little Bacchante, and singing at the top of her 
sweet, lark-like voice : 

“ Turcos ! Lignards ! 

Bon Zigs ! Truffards ! 

Autour des couscoussou, 

Sont tous mes chers zou-zoub ! 

Roumis, 

Spahis, 

Meme les Arbis, 

Joyeux 
Et Bleus, 

Meme les Recrues, 

Ont pour moi, 

Quand on boit, 

L’air des rois — 

L’air des rois ! 

X mon cceur le chemin 
N’est eu’ par le vin ! 

Le bidon qu’on savoure 
Est le titre k m’amour ! ” 

With which doggerel declaration of her own mercenary and 
cosmopolitan sentiments chanted in Sabir slang, the little 
Friend of the Flag resumed her wildest bounds and her most 
airy fantasias. At the sound of the animated altercation, not 
knowing but what one of his own troopers might be the delin- 
quent, he who leaned out of the little casement moved forward 
to the doorway of the dancing room; he did not guess that it 
was himself whom she had defended against the onslaught of 
the Zephyr, Barbe-Grise. 

*Gun. t Newly-joined soldier. 

X Conqueror of women. § Soldier fine-gentleman. 


228 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


His height rose far above the French soldiers, and above 
most even of the lofty-statured Spahis, and her rapid glance 
flashed over him at once. “ Did he hear ? ” she wondered ; the 
scarlet flush of exercise and excitement deepened on her clear 
brown cheek, that had never blushed at the coarsest jests or the 
broadest love words of the barrack-life that had been about 
her ever since her eyes first opened in their infancy to laugh 
at the sun-gleam on a cuirassier’s corslet among the baggage- 
wagons that her mother followed. She thought he had not 
heard; his face was grave, a little weary, and his gaze, as it 
fell on her, was abstracted. 

“ Oh, he ! Beau Roumi ! ” thought Cigarette, with a flash of 
hot wrath superseding her momentary and most rare embar- 
rassment. “You are looking at me and not thinking of me? 
We will soon change that!” 

Such an insult she had never been subjected to, from the 
first day when she had danced for sweetmeats on the top of 
a great drum when she was three years old, in the middle of 
a circular camp of Tirailleurs. It sent fresh nerve into her 
lithe limbs, it made her eyes flash like so much fire, it gave 
her a millionfold more grace, more abandon, more heedlessness, 
more piqued and reckless desinvolture. She stamped her tiny, 
spurred foot petulantly. 

“ Plus vite ! Plus vite ! ” * she cried ; and as the musician 
obeyed her, she whirled, she spun, she bounded, she seemed to 
live in air, while her soft curls blew off her brow, and her white 
teeth glanced, and her cheeks glowed with a carmine glow, and 
the little gold aiglettes broke across her chest with the beating 
of her heart that throbbed like a bird’s heart when it is wild 
with the first breath of Spring. 

She had pitted herself against him; and she won — so far. 

The vivacity, the impetuosity, the antelope elegance, the 
voluptuous repose that now and then broke the ceaseless, 
sparkling movement of her dancing, caught his eyes and fixed 
them on her; it was bewitching, and it bewitched him for the 
moment; he watched her as in other days he had watched the 
fantastic witcheries of eastern alme, and the ballet charms of 
opera dancers. 

This young Bohemian of the Barrack danced in the dusky 
glare and the tavern fumes of the As de Pique to a set of 
soldiers in their shirt-sleeves with their short, black pipes in 
* “ Quicker ! quicker ! ” 


\ 



Photo by Byron 









CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE. 


229 


their mouths, with as matchless a grace as ever the first bal- 
lerina * of Europe danced before sovereigns and dukes on the 
boards of Paris, Vienna, or London. It was the eastern bam- 
boula of the Harems, to which was added all the elastic joyance, 
all the gay brilliancy of the blood of France. 

Suddenly she lifted both her hands above her head. 

“ A moi, Roumis ! ” 

It was the signal well known, the signal of permission to 
join in that wild vertigo for which every one of her spectators 
was panting; their pipes were flung away, their kepis tossed 
off their heads, the music clashed louder and faster, and more 
fiery with every sound; the chorus of the Marseillaise des 
Bataillons thundered from a hundred voices — they danced as 
only men can dance who serve under the French flag, and live 
under the African sun. Two, only, still looked on — the Chas- 
seur d’Afrique, and a veteran of the 10th company, lamed for 
life at Mazagran. 

“En ta maboull? Tu ne danses pas — toi?” * muttered the 
veteran Zephyr to his silent companion. 

The Chasseur turned and smiled a little. 

“ I prefer a bamboula whose music is the cannon, bon pere.” 

“ Bravo ! Yet she is pretty enough to tempt you? ” 

“ Yes; too pretty to be unsexed by such a life.” 

His thoughts went to a woman he had loved well: a young 
Arab, with eyes like the softness of dark waters, who had fallen 
to him once in a razzia as his share of spoil, and for whom he 
had denied himself cards, or wine, or tobacco, or an hour at 
the Cafe, or anything that alleviated the privation and severity 
of his lot as “ simple soldat,” which he had been then, that she 
might have such few and slender comforts as he could give 
her from his miserable pay. She was dead. Her death had 
been the darkest passage in his life in Africa — but the flute-like 
music of her voice seemed to come on his ear now. This girl- 
soldier had little charm for him after the sweet, silent, tender 
grace of his lost Zelme. 

He turned and touched on the shoulder a Chasseur who had 
paused a moment to get breath in the headlong whirl : 

“ Come, we are to be with the Djied by dawn! ” 

The trooper obeyed instantly; they were ordered to visit 
and remain with a Bedouin camp some thirty miles away on the 
naked plateau; a camp professedly submissive, but not so much 

* Dancing girls. t “ Are you a stupid ? Don’t you dance— eh ? ’* 


230 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


so but that the Bureau deemed it well to profit themselves by 
the services of the corporal, whose knowledge of Arabic, whose 
friendship with the tribes, and whose superior intelligence in all 
such missions rendered him peculiarly fitted for errands that 
required diplomacy and address as well as daring and fire. 

He went thoughtfully out of the noisy, reeking ballroom into 
the warm luster of the Algerian night; as he went. Cigarette, 
who had been nearer than he knew, flashed full in his eyes the 
fury of her own sparkling ones, while, with a contemptuous 
laugh, she struck him across the lips with the cigar she hurled 
at him. 

“ Unsexed ? Pouf ! If you have a woman’s face, may I not 
have a man’s soul ? It is only a fair exchange. I am no kitten, 
bon zig ; take care of my talons ! ” 

The words were spoken with the fierceness of Africa ; she had 
too much in her of the spirit of the Zephyrs and the Chacals, 
with whom her youth had been spent from her cradle up, not to 
be dangerous when roused; she was off at a bound, and in the 
midst of the mad whirl again before he could attempt to soften 
or efface the words she had overheard, and the last thing he saw 
of her was in a cloud of Zouaves and Spahis with the wild 
tintamarre* of the music shaking riotous echoes from the 
rafters. 

But when he had passed out of sight Cigarette shook herself 
free from the dancers with petulant impatience; she was not 
to be allured by flattery or drawn by entreaty back amongst 
them; she set her delicate pearly teeth tight, and vowed with 
a reckless, contemptuous, impetuous oath that she was tired; 
that she was sick of them; that she was no strolling player 
to caper for them with a tambourine ; and with that declaration 
made her way out alone into the little open court under the 
stars, so cool, so still after the heat, and riot, and turbulence 
within. 

There she dropped on a broad stone step, and leaned her head 
on her hand. 

“ Unsexed ! unsexed ! What did he mean ? ” she thought, 
while for the first time, with a vague sense of his meaning, tears 
welled hot and bitter into her sunny eyes, while the pained 
color burned in her face. Those tears were the first that she 
had ever known, and they were cruel ones, though they lasted 
but a little time; there was too much fire in the young Bo- 

* Uproar. 



Photo by Byron 









4 


CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE. 


231 


hernian of the Army not to scorch them as they rose. She 
stamped her foot on the stones passionately, and her teeth were 
set like a little terrier’s as she muttered: 

“ Unsexed ! unsexed ! Bah, M’sieu 1’ Aristocrat ! If you think 
so, you shall find your thought right; you shall find Cigarette 
can hate as men hate, and take her revenge as soldiers take 
theirs ! ” 


CHAPTER XVII. 


UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR. 

It was just sunset. 

The far-off summits of the Djurjura were tinted with the 
intense glare the distant pines and cypresses cut sharply against 
the rose-warmed radiance of the sky. On the slopes of the hills 
white cupolas and terraced gardens, where the Algerine haouach 
still showed the taste and luxury of Algerine corsairs, rose up 
among their wild olive shadows on the groves of the lentiscus. 
In the deep gorges that were channeled between the riven rocks 
the luxuriance of African vegetation ran riot; the feathery 
crests of tossing reeds, the long, floating leaves of plants, filling 
the dry water-courses of vanished streams; the broad foliage 
of the wild fig, and the glowing, dainty blossoms of the oleander, 
wherever a trace of brook, or pool, or rivulet let it put forth 
its beautiful coronal, growing one in another in the narrow 
valleys, and the curving passes, wherever broken earth or rock 
gave shelter from the blaze and heat of the North African day. 

Farther inland the bare, sear stretches of brown plain were 
studded with dwarf palm, the vast shadowless plateaux were 
desolate as the great desert itself far beyond; and the sun, as 
it burned on them a moment in the glory of its last glow, found 
them naked and grand by the sheer force of immensity and 
desolation, but dreary and endless, and broken into refts and 
chasms, as though to make fairer by their own barren solitude 
the laughing luxuriance of the sea-face of the Sahel. 

A moment, and the luster of the light flung its own magic 
brilliancy over the Algerine water-line, and then shone full 
on the heights of El Biar and Bouzariah, and on the lofty, deli- 
cate form of the Italian pines that here and there, Sicilian-like, 
threw out their graceful heads against the amber sun-glow and 
the deep azure of the heavens. Then swiftly, suddenly, the sun 
sank ; twilight passed like a gray, gliding shade, an instant, over 
earth and sea ; and night — the balmy, sultry, star-studded night 
of Africa, — fell over the thirsty leafage longing for its dews, 
the closed flowers that slumbered at its touch, the seared and 

232 



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. ■ ■ 


UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR. 


233 


blackened plains to which its coolness could bring no herbage, 
the massive hills that seemed to lie so calmly in its rest. 

Camped on one of the bare stretches above the Mustapha 
Road was a circle of Arab tents; the circle was irregularly 
kept, and the Kriimas were scattered at will; here a low one 
of canvas, there one of goatskin; here a white towering canopy 
of teleze, there a low striped little nest of shelter, and loftier 
than all, the stately beit el shar of the Sheik, with his standard 
stuck into the earth in front of it, with its heavy folds hang- 
ing listlessly in the sultry, breathless air. 

The encampment stretched far over the level, arid earth, and 
there was more than one tent where the shadowing folds of 
the banner marked the abode of some noble Djied. Disorder 
reigned supreme, in all the desert freedom; horses and mules, 
goats and camels, tethered, strayed among the conical houses 
of hair, browsing off the littered straw or the tossed-down hay; 
and caldrons seethed and hissed over wood fires, whose lurid 
light was flung on the eagle features and the white haiks of the 
wanderers who watched the boiling of their mess, or fed the 
embers with dry sticks. Round other fires, having finished the 
eating of their couscoussou, the Bedouins lay full-length; en- 
joying the solemn silence which they love so little to break, 
and smoking their long pipes ; while through the shadows about 
them glided the lofty figures of their brethren, with the folds 
of their sweeping burnous floating in the gloom. It was a pic- 
ture, Rembrandt in color, Oriental in composition; with the 
darkness surrounding it stretching out into endless distance 
that led to the mystic silence of the great desert; and above 
the intense blue of the gorgeous night, with the stars burning 
through white, transparent mists of slowly drifting clouds. 

In the central tent, tall and crimson-striped, with its mighty 
standard reared in front, and its opening free to the night, sat 
the Khalifa, the head of the tribe, with a circle of Arabs about 
him. He was thrown on his cushions, rich enough for a se- 
raglio, while the rest squatted on the morocco carpet that cov- 
ered the bare ground, and that was strewn with round brass 
Moorish trays and little cups emptied of their coffee. The sides 
of the tent were hung with guns and swords, lavishly adorned; 
and in the middle stood a tall Turkish candle-branch in fretted 
work, whose light struggled with the white flood of the moon, 
and the ruddy, fitful glare from a wood fire without. 

Beneath its light, which fell full on him, flung down upon 


234 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


another pile of cushions facing the open front of the tent, was 
a guest whom the Khalifa delighted to honor. Only a Corporal 
of Chasseurs, and once a foe, yet one with whom the Arab 
found the brotherhood of brave men, and on whom he lavished, 
in all he could, the hospitalities and honors of the desert. 

The story of their friendship ran thus : 

The tribe was now allied with France, or, at least, had ac- 
cepted French sovereignty, and pledged itself to neutrality in 
the hostilities still rife; but a few years before, far in the in- 
terior and leagued with the Kabailes, it had been one of the 
fiercest and most dangerous among the enemies of France. At 
that time the Khalifa and the Chasseur met in many a skirmish ; 
hot, desperate struggles, where men fought horse to horse, hand 
to hand; midnight frays, when, in the heart of lonely ravines, 
Arab ambuscades fell on squadrons of French cavalry; terrible 
chases through the heat of torrid suns, when the glittering ranks 
of the charging troops swept down after the Bedouins’ flight; 
fiery combats, when the desert sand and the smoke of musketry 
circled in clouds above the close-locked struggle, and the Leop- 
ard of France and the Lion of Sahara wrestled in a death-grip. 

In these, through four or five seasons of warfare, the Sheik 
and the Chasseur had encountered each other, till each had 
grown to look for the other’s face as soon as the standards of 
the Bedouins flashed in the sunshine opposite the guidons of 
the Imperial forces ; till each had watched and noted the other’s 
unmatched prowess, and borne away the wounds of the other’s 
home-strokes, with the admiration of a bold soldier for a bold 
rival’s dauntlessness and skill; till each had learned to long for 
an hour, hitherto always prevented by waves of battle that had 
swept them too soon asunder, when they should meet in a 
duello once for all, and try their strength together till one bore 
off victory and one succumbed to death. 

At last it came to pass that, after a lengthened term of this 
chivalrous antagonism, the tribe were sorely pressed by the 
French troops, and could no longer mass its fearless front to 
face them, but had to flee southward to the desert, and encum- 
bered by its flocks and its women, was hardly driven and greatly 
decimated. Kow among those women was one whom the Sheik 
held above all earthly things except his honor in war; a beauti- 
ful antelope-eyed creature, lithe and graceful as a palm, and 
the daughter of a pure Arab race, on whom he could not endure 
for any other sight than his own to look, and whom he guarded 


UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR. 


235 


in his tent as the chief pearl of all his treasures; herds, flocks, 
arms, even his horses, all save the honor of his tribe, he would 
have surrendered rather than surrender Djelma. It was a pas- 
sion with him; a passion that not even the iron of his temper 
and the dignity of his austere calm could abate or conceal ; and 
the rumor of it and of the beauty of its object reached the 
French camp, till an impatient curiosity was roused about her, 
and a raid that should bear her off became the favorite specula- 
tion round the picket fires at night, and in the scorching noons, 
when the men lay stripped to their waist — panting like tired 
dogs under the hot, withering breath that stole to them from 
sweeping over the yellow seas of sands. 

Their heated fancies had pictured this treasure of the great 
Djied as something beyond all that her sex had ever given 
them, and to snare her in some unwary moment was the chief 
thought of Zephyr and Spahi when they went out on a scouting 
or foraging party. But it was easier said than done; the eyes 
of no Frank ever fell on her, and when he was most closely 
driven the Khalifa Ilderim abandoned his cattle and sheep, but, 
with the females of the tribe still safely guarded, fell more and 
more backward and southward; drawing the French on and on, 
farther and farther across the plains, in the sickliest times of 
hottest drought. 

Be-enforcements could swell the Imperial ranks as swiftly as 
they were thinned, but with the Arabs a man once fallen was a 
man the less to their numbers forever, and the lightning-like 
pursuit began to tell terribly on them; their herds had fallen 
into their pursuers’ hands, and famine menaced them. Never- 
theless, they were fierce in attack as tigers, rapid in swoop as 
vultures, and fought flying in such fashion that the cavalry lost 
more in this fruitless, worthless work than they would have 
done in a second Hohenlinden or Austerlitz. 

Moreover, the heat was intense, water was bad and very rare, 
dysentery came with the scorch and the toil of this endless 
charge; the chief in command, M. le Marquis de Chateauroy, 
swore heavily as he saw many of his best men dropping off like 
sheep in a murrain, and he offered two hundred napoleons to 
whosoever should bring either the dead Sheik’s head or the liv- 
ing beauty of Djelma. 

One day the Chasseurs had pitched their camp where a few 
barren, withered trees gave a semblance of shelter, and a little 
thread of brackish water oozed through the yellow earth. 


236 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


It was high noon; the African sun was at its fiercest; far 
as the eye could reach there was only one boundless, burning, 
unendurable glitter of parching sand and cloudless sky — brazen 
beneath, brazen above — till the desert and the heavens touched, 
and blent in one tawny, fiery glow in the measureless distance. 
The men lay under canvas, dead-beat, half -naked, without the 
power to do anything except to fight like thirst-maddened dogs 
for a draught at the shallow stream that they and their breath- 
less horses soon drained dry. 

Even Raoul de Chateauroy, though his frame was like an 
Arab’s, and knit into Arab endurance, was stretched like a 
great bloodhound, chained by the sultry oppression. He was 
ruthless, inflexible, a tyrant to the core, and sharp and swift as 
steel in his rigor, but he was a fine soldier, and never spared 
himself any of the hardships that his regiment had to endure 
under him. 

Suddenly the noon lethargy of the camp was broken; a 
trumpet-call rang through the stillness ; against the amber 
transparency of the horizon line the outlines of half a dozen 
horsemen were seen looming nearer and nearer with every mo- 
ment ; they were some Spahis who had been out “ sondant le 
terrain aux environs.” * The mighty frame of Chateauroy, al- 
most as unclothed as an athlete’s, started from its slumberous, 
panting rest; his eyes lightened hungrily; he muttered a fiery 
oath : “ Mort de Dieu ! — they have the woman ! ” 

They had the woman. She had been netted near a water- 
spring, to which she had wandered too loosely guarded, and too 
far from the Bedouin encampment. The delight of the haughty 
Sidi’s eyes was borne off to the tents of his foes, and the 
Colonel’s face flushed darkly with an eager, lustful warmth, as 
he looked upon his captive. Rumor had not outboasted the 
Arab girl’s beauty; it was lustrous as ever was that when, far 
yonder to the eastward, under the curled palms of Nile, the 
sorceress of the Caesars swept through her rose-strewn palace 
chambers. Only Djemla was as innocent as the gazelle, whose 
grace she resembled, and loved her lord with a great love. 

Of her suffering her captor took no more heed than if she 
were a young bird dying of shot-wounds; but, with one tri- 
umphant, admiring glance at her, he wrote a message in Arabic, 
to send to the Khalifa, ere her loss was discovered — a message 


* Sweeping the country for food. 


UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR. 


-237 


more cruel than iron. He hesitated a second, where he lay at 
the opening of his tent, whom he should send with it. His men 
were almost all half-dead with the sun-blaze. His glance 
chanced to light in the distance on a soldier to whom he bore 
no love — causelessly, but bitterly all the same. He had him 
summoned, and eyed him with a curious amusement — Chateau- 
roy treated his squadrons with much the same sans-fagon fa- 
miliarity and brutality that a chief of filibusters uses to his. 

“ So ! you heed the heat so little, you give up your turn of 
water to a drummer, they say ? ” 

The Chasseur gave the salute with a calm deference. A 
faint flush passed over the sun-bronze of his forehead. He had 
thought the Sidney-like sacrifice had been unobserved. 

“ The drummer was but a child, mon Commandant.” 

“Be so good as to give us no more of those melodramatic 
acts! ” said M. le Marquis contemptuously. “ You are too fond 
of trafficking in those showy fooleries. You bribe your com- 
rades for their favoritism too openly. Ventre bleu! I forbid it 
— do you hear ? ” 

“ I hear, mon Colonel.” 

The assent was perfectly tranquil and respectful. He was 
too good a soldier not to render perfect obedience, and keep 
perfect silence, under any goad of provocation to break both. 

“Obey, then!” said Chateauroy savagely. “Well, since you 
love heat so well, you shall take a flag of truce and my scroll 
to the Sidi Ilderim. But tell me, first, what do you think of 
this capture ? ” 

“ It is not my place to give opinions, M. le Colonel.” 

“ Pardieu ! it is your place when I bid you. Speak, or I will 
have the matraque cut the words out of you ! ” 

“ I may speak frankly ? ” 

“ Ten thousand curses — yes ! ” 

“ Then, I think that those who make war on women are no 
longer fit to fight with men.” 

For a moment the long, sinewy, massive form of Chateauroy 
started from the skins on which he lay at full length, like a lion 
started from its lair. His veins swelled like black cords; under 
the mighty muscle of his bare chest his heart beat visibly in 
the fury of his wrath. 

“ By God ! I have a mind to have you shot like a dog ! ” 

The Chasseur looked at him carelessly, composedly, but with 
a serene deference still, as due from a soldier to his chief. 


238 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ You have threatened it before, M. le Colonel. It may be 
as well to do it, or the army may think you capricious.” 

Raoul de Chateauroy crushed a blasphemous oath through his 
clinched teeth, and laughed a certain short, stern, sardonic 
laugh, which his men dreaded more than his wrath. 

“ No ; I will send you instead to the Khalifa. He often saves 
me the trouble of killing my own curs. Take a flag of truce and 
this paper, and never draw rein till you reach him, if your beast 
drop dead at the end.” 

The Chasseur saluted, took the paper, bowed with a certain 
languid, easy grace that camp life never cured him of, and 
went. He knew that the man who should take the news of his 
treasure’s loss to the Emir Ilderim would, a thousand to one, 
perish by every torture desert cruelty could frame, despite the 
cover of the white banner. 

Chateauroy looked after him, as he and his horse passed from 
the French camp in the full burning tide of noon. 

“ If the Arabs kill him,” he thought, “ I will forgive Ilderim 
five seasons of rebellion.” 

The Chasseur, as he had been bidden, never drew rein across 
the scorching plateau. He rode to what he knew was like 
enough to be death, and death by many a torment, as though he 
rode to a midnight love-tryst. His horse was of Arab breed — 
young, fleet, and able to endure extraordinary pressure, both 
of spur and of heat. He swept on, far and fast, through the 
sickly, lurid glitter of the day, over the loose sand, that flew 
in puffs around him as the hoofs struck it flying right and left. 
At last, ere he reached the Bedouin tents, that were still but 
slender black points against the horizon, he saw the Sheik and 
a party of horsemen returning from a foraging quest, and in 
ignorance as yet of the abduction of Djelma. He galloped 
straight to them, and halted across their line of march, with the 
folds of the little white flag fluttering in the sun. The Bedouins 
drew bridle, and Ilderim advanced alone. He was a magnificent 
man, of middle age, with the noblest type of the eagle-eyed, 
aquiline desert beauty. He was a superb specimen of his race, 
without the lean, withered, rapacious, vulture look which often 
mars it. His white haik floated round limbs fit for a Colossus ; 
and under the snowy folds of his turban the olive-bronze of 
his bold forehead, the sweep of his jet-black beard, and the 
piercing luminance of his eyes had a grand and kingly 
majesty. 


UJNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR. 


239 


A glance of recognition flashed from him on the Lascar, who 
had so often crossed swords with him ; and he waved back the 
scroll with dignified courtesy. 

“ Read it me.” 

It was read. Bitterly, blackly shameful, the few brutal words 
were. They netted him as an eagle is netted in a shepherd’s 
trap. 

The moment that he gave a sign of advancing against his 
ravishers, the captive’s life would pay the penalty; if he merely 
remained in arms, without direct attack, she would be made the 
Marquis’ mistress, and abandoned later to the army. The only 
terms on which he could have her restored were instant submis- 
sion to the Imperial rule, and personal homage of himself and 
all his Djouad to the Marquis as the representative of France — 
homage in which they should confess themselves dogs and the 
sons of dogs. 

So ran the message of peace. 

The Chasseur read on to the end calmly. Then he lifted his 
gaze, and looked at the Emir — he expected fifty swords to be 
buried in his heart. 

As he gazed, he thought no more of his own doom; he 
thought only of the revelation before him, of what passion and 
what agony could be — things unknown in the world where the 
chief portion of his life had passed. He was a war-hardened 
campaigner, trained in the ruthless school of African hostili- 
ties ; who had seen every shape of mental and physical suffering, 
when men were left to perish of gun-wounds, as the rush of 
the charge swept on; when writhing horses died by the score 
of famine and of thirst; when the firebrand was hurled among 
sleeping encampments, and defenseless women were torn from 
their rest by the unsparing hands of pitiless soldiers. But the 
torture which shook for a second the steel-knit frame of this 
Arab passed all that he had dreamed as possible; it was mute, 
and held in bonds of iron, for the sake of the desert pride of a 
great ruler’s majesty; but it spoke more than any eloquence 
ever spoke yet on earth. 

With a wild, shrill yell, the Bedouins whirled their naked 
sabers above their heads, and rushed down on the bearer of 
this shame to their chief and their tribe. The Chasseur did 
not seek to defend himself. He sat motionless. He thought 
the vengeance just. 

The Sheik raised his sword, and signed them back, as he 


240 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


-pointed to the white folds of the flag. Then his voice rolled 
out like thunder over the stillness of the plains: 

“ But that you trust yourself to my honor I would rend you 
limb from limb. Go back to the tiger who rules you, and tell 
him that — as Allah liveth — I will fall on him and smite him as 
he hath never been smitten. Dead or living, I will have back 
my own. If he take her life, I will have ten thousand lives, 
to answer it; if he deal her dishonor, I will light such a holy 
war through the length and breadth of the land that his nation 
shall be driven backward like choked dogs into the sea, and 
perish from the face of the earth for evermore. And this I 
swear by the Law and the Prophet ! ” 

The menace rolled out, imperious as a monarch’s, thrilling 
through the desert hush. The Chasseur bent his head, as the 
words closed. His own teeth were tightly clinched, and his. 
face was dark. 

“ Emir, listen to one word,” he said briefly. “ Shame has 
been done to me as to you. Had I been told what words I 
bore, they had never been brought by my hand. You know me. 
You have had the marks of my steel, as I have had the marks 
of yours. Trust me in this, Sidi. I pledge you my honor that, 
before the sun sets, she shall be given back to you unharmed, 
or I will return here myself, and your tribe shall slay me in. 
what fashion they will. So alone can she be saved uninjured. 
Answer, will you have faith in me ? ” 

The desert chief looked at him long; sitting motionless as 
a stature on his stallion, with the fierce gleam of his eyes fixed 
on the eyes of the man who so long had been his foe in contests, 
whose chivalry equaled their daring. The Chasseur never wav- 
ered once under the set, piercing, ruthless gaze. 

Then the Emir pointed to the sun, that was not at its 
zenith : 

“You are a great warrior: such men do not lie. Go, and if 
she be borne to me before the sun is half-way sunk toward the 
west, all the branches of the tribes of Ilderim shall be as your 
brethren, and bend as steel to your bidding. If not — as God 
is mighty — not one man in all your host shall live to tell the 
tale!” 

The Chasseur bowed his head to his horse’s mane ; then, with- 
out a word, wheeled round, and sped back across the plain. 

When he reached his own cavalry camp, he went straightway 
to his chief. What passed between them none ever knew. The 


UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR. 


241 


interview was brief; it was possibly as stormy. Pregnant and 
decisive it assuredly was; and the squadrons of Africa mar- 
veled that the man who dared beard Raoul de Chateauroy in 
his lair came forth with his life. Whatever the spell he used, 
the result was a marvel. 

At the very moment that the sun touched the lower half of 
the western heavens, the Sheik Ilderim, where he sat in his 
saddle, with all his tribe stretching behind him, full-armed, to 
sweep down like falcons on the spoilers, if the hour passed with 
the pledge unredeemed, saw the form of the Chasseur reappear 
between his sight and the glare of the skies; nor did he ride 
alone. That night the Pearl of the Desert lay once more in 
the mighty, sinuous arms of the great Emir. 

But, with the dawn, his vengeance fell in terrible fashion 
on the sleeping camp of the Franks; and from that hour dated 
the passionate, savage, unconcealed hate of Raoul de Chateau- 
roy for the most daring soldier of all his fiery Horse, known in 
his troop as “ Bel-a-faire-peur.” 

It was in the tent of Ilderim now that he reclined, looking 
outward at the night where flames were leaping ruddily under 
a large caldron, and far beyond was the dark immensity of the 
star-studded sky; the light of the moon strayed in and fell on 
the chestnut waves of his beard, out of which the long amber 
stem of an Arab pipe glittered like a golden line, and on the 
delicate, feminine cast of his profile, which, with the fairness of 
the skin — fair, despite a warm hue of bronze — and the long, 
slumberous softness of the hazel eyes, were in so marked a 
contrast of race with the eagle outlines of the Bedouins around. 

From the hour of the restoration of his treasure the Sheik 
had been true to his oath; his tribe in all its branches had held 
the French lascar in closest brotherhood; wherever they were 
he was honored and welcomed ; was he in war, their swords were 
drawn for him; was he in need, their houses of hair were 
spread for him; had he want of flight, the swiftest and most 
precious of their horses was at his service; had he thirst, they 
would have died themselves, wringing out the last drop from 
the water-skin for him. Through him their alliance, or more 
justly to speak, their neutrality, was secured to France, and 
the Bedouin Chief loved him with a great, silent, noble love 
that was fast rooted in the granite of his nature. Between them 
there was a brotherhood that beat down the antagonism of race, 
and was stronger than the instinctive hate of the oppressed for 


242 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


all who came under the abhorred standard of the usurpers. He 
liked the Arabs, and they liked him ; a grave courtesy, a prefer- 
ence for the fewest words and least demonstration possible, a 
marked opinion that silence was golden, and that speech was 
at best only silver-washed metal, an instinctive dread of all 
discovery of emotion, and a limitless power of resisting and sup- 
pressing suffering, were qualities the nomads of the desert and 
the lion of the Chasseurs d’Afrique had in common; as they 
had in unison a wild passion for war, a dauntless zest in danger, 
and a love for the hottest heat of fiercest battle. 

Silence reigned in the tent, beyond whose first division, 
screened by a heavy curtain of goat’s hair, the beautiful young 
Djelma played with her only son, a child of three or four sum- 
mers; the Sheik lay mute, the Djouad and Marabouts around 
never spoke in his presence unless their lord bade them, and 
the Chasseur was stretched motionless, his elbow resting on a 
cushion of Morocco fabric, and his eyes looking outward at the 
restless, changing movement of the firelit, starlit camp. 

After the noise, the mirth, the riotous songs, and the gay, 
elastic good humor of his French comrades, the silence and the 
calm of the Emir’s “ house of hair ” were welcome to him. He 
never spoke much himself; of a truth, his gentle, immutable 
laconism was the only charge that his Chambree ever brought 
against him. That a man could be so brief in words, while yet 
so soft in manner, seemed a thing out of all nature to the 
vivacious Frenchmen; that unchanging stillness and serenity 
in one who was such a reckless, resistless croc-mitaine, swift as 
fire in the field, was an enigma that the Cavalerie and the Demi- 
cavalerie of Algeria never solved. His corps would have gone 
after him to the devil, as Claude de Chanrellon had averred ; but 
they would sometimes wax a little impatient that he would never 
grow communicative or thread many phrases together, even 
over the best wine which ever warmed the hearts of its drinkers 
or loosened all rein from their lips. 

“ I wish I had come straight to you, Sidi, when I first set 
foot in Africa,” he said at last, while the fragrant smoke un- 
curled from under the droop of his long, pendent mustaches. 

“ Truly it had been well,” answered the Khalifa, who would 
have given the best stallions in his stud to have had this Frank 
with him in warfare, and in peace. “ There is no life like our 
life.” 

“ Faith ! I think not ! ” murmured the Chasseur, rather to 


UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR. 243 

himself than the Bedouin. “ The desert keeps you and your 
horse, and you can let all the rest of the world 1 slide/ ” 

“ But we are murderers and pillagers, say your nations,” 
resumed the Emir, with the shadow of a sardonic smile flicker- 
ing an instant over the sternness and composure of his features. 
“To rifle a caravan is a crime, though to steal a continent is 
glory.” 

Bel-a-faire-peur laughed slightly. 

“ Do not tempt me to rebel against my adopted flag.” 

The Sheik looked at him in silence; the French soldiers had 
spent twelve years in the ceaseless exertions of an amused 
inquisitiveness to discover the antecedents of their volunteer; 
the Arabs, with their loftier instincts of courtesy, had never 
hinted to him a question of whence or why he had come upon 
African soil. 

“ I never thought at all in those days ; else, had I thought 
twice, I should not have gone to your enemies,” he answered, 
as he lazily watched the Bedouins without squat on their heels 
round the huge brass bowls of couscoussou, which they kneaded 
into round lumps and pitched between their open, bearded lips 
in their customary form of supper. “ Not but what our Roumis 
are brave fellows enough; better comrades no man could want.” 

The Khalifa took the long pipe from his mouth and spoke; 
his slow, sonorous accents falling melodiously on the silence 
in the lingua sapir of the Franco- Arab tongue. 

“Your comrades are gallant men; they are lascars kebirs,* 
and fearless foes; against such my voice is never lifted, how- 
ever my sword may cross with them. But the locust-swarms 
that devour the land are the money-eaters, the petty despots, 
the bribe-takers, the men who wring gold out of infamy, who 
traffic in tyrannies, who plunder under official seals, who curse 
Algiers with avarice, with fraud, with routine, with the hell- 
spawn of civilization. It is the ‘ Bureaucratie,’ as your tongue 
phrases it, that is the spoiler and the oppressor of the soil. # 
But — Inshallah! we endure only for a while. A little, and the 
shame of the invader’s tread will be washed out in blood. Allah 
is great; we can wait.” 

And with Moslem patience that the fiery gloom of his burn- 
ing eyes belied, the Djied stretched himself once more into im- 
movable and silent rest. 

The Chasseur answered nothing; his sympathies were heart- 
* Great warriors. 


244 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


felt with the Arabs, his allegiance and his esprit de corps were 
with the service in which he was enrolled. He could not defend 
French usurpation; but neither could he condemn the Flag that 
had now become his Flag, and in which he had grown to feel 
much of national honor, to take much of national pride. 

“ They will never really win again, I am afraid,” he thought, 
as his eyes followed the wraith-like flash of the white burnous, 
as the Bedouins glided to and fro in the chiar-oscuro of the 
encampment; now in the flicker of the flames, now in the sil- 
vered luster of the moon. “ It is the conflict of the races, as 
the cant runs, and their day is done. It is a bolder, freer, sim- 
pler type than anything we get in the world yonder. Shall we 
ever drift back to it in the future, I wonder ? ” 

The speculation did not stay with him long; Semitic, Latin, 
or Teuton race was very much the same to him, and intellectual 
subtleties had not much attraction at any time for the most 
brilliant soldier in the French cavalry; he preferred the ring 
of the trumpets, the glitter of the sun’s play along the line of 
steel as his regiment formed in line on the eve of a life-and- 
death struggle, the wild, breathless sweep of a midnight gallop 
over the brown, swelling plateau under the light of the stars, 
or, — in some brief interval of indolence and razzia-won wealth, 
— the gleam of fair eyes and the flush of sparkling sherbet when 
some passionate, darkling glance beamed on him from some 
Arab mistress whose scarlet lips murmured to him through 
the drowsy hush of an Algerine night the sense, if not the song, 
of Pelagia, 

“ Life is so short at best ! 

Take while thou canst thy rest, 

Sleeping by me ! ” 

His thoughts drifted back over many varied scenes and 
changing memories of his service in Algiers, as he lay there 
at the entrance of the Sheik’s tent, with the night of looming 
shadow and reddened firelight and picturesque movement be- 
fore him. Hours of reckless, headlong delight, when men grew 
drunk with bloodshed as with wine; hours of horrible, unsuc- 
cored suffering, when the desert thirst had burned in his throat 
and the jagged lances been broken off at the hilt in his flesh, 
while above-head the carrion birds wheeled, waiting their meal ; 
hours of unceasing, unsparing slaughter, when the word was 
given to slay and yield no mercy, where in the great, vaulted, 
cavernous gloom of rent rocks, the doomed were hemmed as 



Photo by Byron 






UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR. 


245 


close as sheep in shambles. Hours, in the warm flush of an 
African dawn, when the arbiter of the duel was the sole judge 
allowed or comprehended by the tigers of the tricolor, and to 
aim a dead shot or to receive one was the only alternative left, 
as the challenging eyes of “ Zephir ” or “ Chasse-Marais ” 
flashed death across the barriere, in a combat where only one 
might live, though the root of the quarrel had been nothing 
more than a toss too much of brandy, a puff of tobacco smoke 
construed into insult, or a fille de joie’s maliciously cast fire- 
brand of taunt or laugh. Hours of severe discipline, of relent- 
less routine, of bitter deprivation, of campaigns hard as steel 
in the endurance they needed, in the miseries they entailed; 
of military subjection, stern and unbending, a yoke of iron 
that a personal and pitiless tyranny weighted with persecution 
that was scarce less than hatred; of an implicit obedience that 
required every instinct of liberty, every habit of early life, every 
impulse of pride and manhood and freedom to be choked down 
like crimes, and buried as though they had never been. Hours 
again that repaid these in full, when the long line of Horse 
swept out to the attack, with the sun on the points of their 
weapons; when the wheeling clouds of Arab riders poured like 
the clouds of the simoon on a thinned, devoted troop that ral- 
lied and fought as hawks fight herons, and saved the day as 
the sky was flushed with that day’s decline; when some soft- 
eyed captive, with limbs of free mountain grace, and the warm 
veins flushing under the clear olive of her cheeks, was first wild 
as a young fettered falcon, and then, like the falcon, quickly 
learned to tremble at a touch, and grow tame under a caress, 
and love nothing so well as the hand that had captured her. 
Hours of all the chanceful fortunes of a soldier’s life, in hill- 
wars and desert raids, passed in memory through his thoughts 
now where he was stretched ; looking dreamily through the film 
of his chibouque smoke at the city of tents, and the couchant 
forms of camels, and the tall, white, slowly moving shapes of 
the lawless marauders of the sand plains. 

“ Is my life worth much more under the French Flag than 
it was under the English?” thought the Chasseur, with a cer- 
tain careless, indifferent irony on himself, natural to him. 
“ There I killed time — here I kill men. Which is the better 
pursuit, I wonder? The world would rather economize the 
first commodity than the last, I believe. Perhaps it don’t make 
an overgood use of either.” 


246 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


His thoughts did not stay long with that theme. He was 
no moralist and no philosopher, though he practiced, without 
ever knowing it, a philosophy of the highest and simplest kind 
with every day that found him in the ranks of the Algerian 
army, and had found thought grow on him, in a grave if a 
desultory fashion, many a time when he had ridden alone 
through defiles that, for aught he knew, might harbor death 
with every step; or sat the only wakeful watcher beside a 
bivouac fire, while his comrades slept around him, and the roar 
of angry beasts rolled upward from the ravines; or paced to 
and fro in solitude on patrol duty, with a yawning mountain 
pass, or a limitless, night-veiled plain before him in the light 
of the moon. He was more silent and more meditative than 
seemed in keeping with a wild lion of the Chasseurs, whose 
daring outdared all the fire-eaters, and whose negligent deviltry 
had become a password all over Africa, till “ quel p’tit verre a 
bu Bel-a-f aire-peur ? ” (alias, “ what special exploit has he done 
to-day?”) became the question put after every skirmish or ex- 
pedition. But he was much more of a soldier than a thinker 
at any time; and, instead of following out the problem of the 
world’s uses of its two raw materials, time and men, he found 
a subject more congenial in the discussion of stable science with 
the Emir. 

To him the austere chief would unbend; with him the thin, 
compressed lips of the Arab would grow eloquent with an im- 
pressive oratory; for him all the bonds of hospitality would 
grow closer and warmer. Ilderim might be a pillager, with a 
sure swoop and a merciless steel, as the officials of the Imperial 
government wrote him out; of a truth, caravanserais had felt 
the tear of his talons, and battalions staggered under the blows 
of his beak; but he had two desert virtues that are obsolete 
in the civilized world; he had gratitude and he had sincerity. 
Of course he was but a nomad, a barbarian, a robber, and a ruler 
of robbers; of course he was but a half-savage Ishmaelite, or 
he would long have abandoned them. 

The night was someway spent when the talk of wild-pigeon- 
blue mares and sorrel stallions closed between the Djied and his 
guest; and the French soldier, who had been sent hither from 
the Bureau Arabe with another of his comrades, took his way 
through the now still camp where the cattle were sleeping, and 
the fires were burning out, and the banner-folds hung motion- 
less in the luster of the stars, to the black-and-white tent pre- 


UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR. 


247 


pared for him. A spacious one, close to the chief’s, and given 
such luxury in the shape of ornamented weapons, thick car- 
pets, and soft cushions, as the tribe’s resources, drawn from 
many a raid on travelers far south, could bring together to 
testify their hospitality. 

As he opened the folds and entered, his fellow-soldier, who 
was lying on his back, with his heels much higher than his 
head, and a short pipe in his teeth, tumbled himself up with a 
rapid somersault, and stood bolt upright, giving the salute; a 
short, sturdy little man, with a skin burnt like a coffee-berry, 
that was in odd contrast with his light, dancing blue eyes, 
and his close, matted curls of yellow hair. 

“ Beg pardon, sir ! I was half asleep ! ” 

The Chasseur laughed a little. 

“ Don’t talk English ; somebody will hear you one day.” 

“ What’s the odds if they do, sir ? ” responded the other. “ It 
relieves one’s feelin’s a little. All of ’em know I’m English, but 
never a one of ’em know what you are. The name you was 
enrolled by won’t really tell ’em nothing. They guess it aint 
yours. That cute little chap, Tata, he says to me yesterday, 
‘ you’re always a-treatin’ of your galonne like as if he was 
a prince.’ 1 Damme ! ’ says 1 , 1 I’d like to see the prince as would 
hold a candle to him.’ 1 You’re right there,’ says the little ’un. 
‘ There aint his equal for takin’ off a beggar’s head with a back 
sweep.’ ” 

The Corporal laughed a little again, as he tossed himself 
down on the carpet. 

“Well, it’s something to have one virtue! But have a care 
what those chatter-boxes get out of you.” 

“ Lord, sir ! Aint I been a-takin’ care these ten years ? It 
comes quite natural now. I couldn’t keep my tongue still ; that 
wouldn’t be in anyways possible. So I’ve let it run on oiled 
wheels on a thousand rum tracks and doublings. I’ve told ’em 
such a lot of amazin’ stories about where we kem from, that 
they’ve got half a million different styles to choose out of. 
Some thinks as how you’re a Polish nob, what got into hot 
water with the Russians; some as how you’re a Italian prince, 
what was cleaned out like Parma and them was ; some as how 
you’re a Austrian Archduke that have cut your country be- 
cause you was in love with the Empress, and had a duel about 
her that scandalized the whole empire; some as how you’re a 
exiled Spanish grandee a-come to learn tactics and that like, 


248 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


that you may go back, and pitch O’Donnell into the middle of 
next week, whenever you see a chance to cut in and try con- 
clusions with him. Bless you, sir! you may let me alone for 
bamboozlin’ of anybody.” 

The Corporal laughed again, as he began to unharness him- 
self. There was in him a certain mingling of insouciance and 
melancholy, each of which alternately predominated ; the former 
his by nature, the latter born of circumstance. 

“ If you can outwit our friends the Zephyrs, and the Lous- 
tics, and the Indigenes, you have reached a height of diplomacy 
indeed! I would not engage to do it myself. Take my word 
for it, ingenuity is always dangerous — silence is always safe.” 

“ That may be, sir,” responded the Chasseur, in the sturdy 
English with which his bright blue eyes danced a fitting na- 
tionality. “No doubt it’s uncommon good for them as can 
bring their minds to it — just like water instead o’ wine — but it’s 
very tryin’, like the teetotalism. You might as well tell a New- 
foundland not to love a splash as me not to love a chatter. I’d 
cut my tongue out sooner than say never a word that you don’t 
wish — but say somethin’ I must, or die for it.” 

With which the speaker, known to Algerian fame by the so- 
briquet of “ Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort,” from the hair-breadth es- 
capes and reckless razzias from which he had come out without 
a scratch, dropped on his knees and began to take off the trap- 
pings of his fellow-soldier, with as reverential a service as 
though he were a lord of the bedchamber serving a Louis 
Quatorze. The other motioned him gently away. 

“ No, no ! I have told you a thousand times we are comrades 
and equals now.” 

“ And I’ve told you a thousand times, sir, that we aren’t, and 
never will be, and don’t oughtn’t to be,” replied the soldier dog- 
gedly, drawing off the spurred and dust-covered boots. “ A 
gentleman’s a gentleman, let alone what straits he fall into.” 

“ But ceases to be one as soon as he takes a service he cannot 
requite, or claims a superiority he does not possess. We have 
been fellow-soldiers for twelve years ” 

“ So we have, sir ; but we are what we always was, and always 
will be — one a gentleman, t’other a scamp. If you think so 
be as I’ve done a good thing, side by side with you, now and 
then in the fightin’, give me my own way and let me wait on 
you when I can. I can’t do much on it when those other fel- 
low’s eyes is on us; but here I can and I will — beggin’ your 


UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR. 


249 


pardon — so there’s an end of it. One may speak plain in this 
place with nothing but them Arabs about; and all the army 
know well enough, sir, that if it weren’t for that black devil, 
Chateauroy, you’d have had your officer’s commission, and your 
troop too, long before now ” 

“ Oh, no ! There are scores of men in the ranks merit pro- 
motion better far than I do. And — leave the Colonel’s name 
alone. He is our chief, whatever else he be.” 

The words were calm and careless, but they carried a weight 
with them that was not to be disputed. “ Crache-au-nez-d’la- 
Mort ” hung his head a little and went on unharnessing his 
Corporal in silence, contenting himself with muttering in his 
throat that it was true for all that, and the whole regiment 
knew it. 

“You are happy enough in Algeria — eh?” asked the one he 
served, as he stretched himself on the skins and carpets, and 
drank down a sherbet that his self-attached attendant had made 
with a skill learned from a pretty cantiniere, who had given 
him the lesson in return for a slashing blow with which he had 
struck down two “ Riz-pain-sels,” who, as the best paid men in 
the army, had tried to cheat her in the price of her Cognac. 

“ I, sir ? Never was so happy in my life, sir. I’d be dis- 
contented indeed if I wasn’t. Always some spicy bit of fighting. 
If there aren’t a fantasia, as they call it, in the field, there’s 
always somebody to pot in a small way; and, if you’re lying by 
in barracks, there’s always a scrimmage hot as pepper to be 
got up with fellows that love the row just as well as you do. 
It’s life, that’s where it is; it aint rustin’.” 

“Then you prefer the French service?” 

“Right and away, sir. You see this is how it is,” and the 
redoubtable, yellow-haired “ Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort ” paused 
in the vigorous cleansing and brushing he was bestowing on his 
Corporal’s uniform and stood at ease in his shirt and trousers; 
with his eloquence no way impeded by the brule-gueule that 
was always between his teeth. “ Over there in England, you 
know, sir, pipe-clay is the deuce-and-all ; you’re always got to 
have the stock on, and look as stiff as a stake, or it’s all up 
with you; you’re that tormented about little things that you 
get riled and kick the traces before the great ’uns come to try 
you. There’s a lot of lads would be game as game could be 
in battle — aye, and good lads to boot, doing- their duty right 
as a trivet when it came to anything like war — that are cleari 


250 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


druv’ out of the service in time o’ peace, along with all them 
petty persecutions that worry a man’s skin like mosquito-bites. 
Now here they know that, and Lord ! what soldiers they do make 
through knowing of it! It’s tight enough and stern enough 
in big things; martial law sharp enough, and obedience to the 
letter all through the campaigning; but that don’t grate on a 
fellow; if he’s worth his salt he’s sure to understand that he 
must move like clockwork in a fight, and that he’s to go to hell 
at double-quick-march, and mute as a mouse, if his officers see 
fit to send him. That’s all right; but they don’t fidget you 
here about the little fal-lals; you may stick your pipe in your 
mouth, you may have your lark, you may do as you like, you 
may spend your decompte how you choose, you may settle your 
little duel as you will, you may shout and sing and jump and 
riot on the march, so long as you march on; you may lounge 
about, half-dressed, in any style as suits you best, so long as 
you’re up to time when the trumpets sound for you; and that’s 
what a man likes. He’s ready to be a machine when the ma- 
chine’s wanted in working trim, but when it’s run off the line 
and the steam all let off, he do like to oil his own wheels, and 
lie a bit in the sun at his fancy. There aren’t better stuff to 
make soldiers out of nowhere than Englishmen, God bless ’em! 
but they’re badgered, they’re horribly badgered; and that’s why 
the service don’t take over there, let alone the way the country 
grudge ’em every bit of pay. In England you go in the ranks — 
well, they all just tell you you’re a blackguard, and there’s the 
lash, and you’d better behave yourself or you’ll get it hot and 
hot; they take for granted you’re a bad lot or you wouldn’t be 
there, and in course you’re riled and go to the bad according, 
seeing that it’s what’s expected of you. Here, contrariwise, you 
come in the ranks and get a welcome, and feel that it just rests 
with yourself whether you won’t be a fine fellow or not; and just 
along of feelin’ that you’re pricked to show the best metal 
you’re made on, and not to let nobody else beat you out of the 
race, like. Ah! it makes a wonderful difference to a fellow — 
a wonderful difference — whether the service he’s come into look 
at him as a scamp that never will be nothin’ but a scamp, or as 
a rascal that’s maybe got in him, all rascal though he is, the 
pluck to turn into a hero. It makes a wonderful difference, 
this ’ere — whether you’re looked at as stuff that’s only fit 
to be shoveled into the sand after a battle ; or as stuff that ’ll be- 
like churn into a great man. And it’s just that difference, sir. 


UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR. 251 

that France has found out, and England hasn’t — God bless 
her, all the same ! ” 

With which the soldier whom England had turned adrift, and 
France had won in her stead, concluded his long oration by- 
dropping on his knees to refill his Corporal’s chibouque. 

“ A army’s just a machine, sir, in course,” he concluded, as 
he rammed in the Turkish tobacco. “ But then it’s a live ma- 
chine, for all that; and each little bit of it feels for itself, like 
the joints in an eel’s body. Now, if only one of them little bits 
smarts, the whole crittur goes wrong — there’s the mischief.” 

Bel-a-faire-peur listened thoughtfully to his comrade where 
he lay flung full-length on the skins. 

“ I dare say you are right enough. I knew nothing of my 
men when — when I was in England; we none of us did; but 
I can very well believe what you say. Yet — fine fellows though 
they are here, they are terrible blackguards ! ” 

“ In course they are, sir ; they wouldn’t be such larky com- 
pany unless they was. But what I say is that they’re scamps 
who’re told they may be great men, if they like; not scamps 
who’re told that, because they’ve once gone to the devil, they 
must always keep there. It makes all the difference in life.” 

“ Yes — it makes all the difference in life, whether hope is 
left, or — left out ! ” 

The words were murmured with a half smile that had a dash 
of infinite sadness in it; the other looked at him quickly with 
a shadow of keen pain passing over the bright, frank, laughing 
features of his sunburned face; he knew that the brief words 
held the whole history of a life. 

“Won’t there never be no hope, sir?” he whispered, while 
his voice trembled a little under the long, fierce “ Zephyr ” 
sweep of his yellow mustaches. 

The Chasseur rallied himself with a slight, careless laugh; 
the laugh with which he had met before now the onslaught of 
charges ferocious as those of the magnificent day of Mazagran. 

“ Whom for ? Both of us ? Oh, yes ; very likely we shall 
achieve fame, and die sous-officiers or gardes-champetres ! A 
splendid destiny.” 

“ No, sir,” said the other, with the hesitation still in the 
quiver of his voice. “ You know I meant, no hope of your ever 
being again ” 

He stopped; he scarcely knew how to phrase the thoughts he 
was thinking. 


252 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


The other moved with a certain impatience. 

“ How often must I tell' you to forget that I was ever any- 
thing except a soldier of France? — forget as I have forgotten 
it!” 

The audacious, irrepressible “ Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort,” 
whom nothing could daunt and nothing could awe, looked peni- 
tent and ashamed as a chidden spaniel. 

“ I know, sir. I have tried, many a year; but I thought, per- 
haps, as how his lordship’s death ■” 

“No life and no death can make any difference to me, except 
the death that some day an x\rbico’s lunge will give me; and 
that is a long time coming.” 

“ Ah, for God’s sake, Mr. Cecil, don’t talk like this ! ” 

The Chasseur gave a short, sharp shiver, and started at the 
name, as if a bullet had struck him. 

“Mever say that again!” 

Rake, Algerian-christened “ Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort,” stam- 
mered a contrite apology. 

“ I never have done, sir — not for never a year ; but it wrung 
it out of me like — you talking of wanting death in that 
way ” 

“ Oh, I don’t want death ! ” laughed the other, with a low, 
indifferent laughter, that had in it a singular tone of sadness 
all the while. “I am of our friends the Spahis’ opinion — that 
life is very pleasant with a handsome, well-chosen harem, and 
a good horse to one’s saddle. Unhappily harems are too ex- 
pensive for Roumis! Yet I am not sure that I am not better 
amused in the Chasseurs than I was in the Household — spe- 
cially when we are at war. I suppose we must be wild animals # 
at the core, or we should never find such an infinite zest in the 
death grapple. Good-night ! ” 

He stretched his long, slender, symmetrical limbs out on the 
skins that made his bed, and closed his eyes, with the chi- 
bouque still in his mouth, and its amber bowl resting on the 
carpet which the friendship and honor of Sidi-Uderim had 
strewn over the bare turf on which the house of hair was raised. 
He was accustomed to sleep as soldiers sleep, in all the din 
of a camp, or with the roar of savage brutes echoing from the 
hills around, with his saddle beneath his head, under a slab 
of rock, or with the knowledge that at every instant the alarm 
might be given, the drums roll out over the night, and the 
enemy be down like lightning on the bivouac. But now a 


UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR. 


253 


name — long unspoken to him — had recalled years he had buried 
far and forever from the first day that he had worn the kepi 
d’ordonnance of the Army of Algeria, and been enrolled among 
its wild and brilliant soldiers. 

Now, long after his comrade had slept soundly, and the light 
in the single bronze Turkish candle-branch had flickered and 
died away, the Chasseur d’Afrique lay wakeful; looking out- 
ward through the folds of the tent at the dark and silent camp 
of the Arabs, and letting his memory drift backward to a time 
that had grown to be to him as a dream — a time when another 
world than the world of Africa had known him as Bertie Cecil. 


CHAPTER XVIII. 


CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE. 


“Oh, he! We are a queer lot; a very queer lot. Sweepings 
of Europe,” said Claude de Chanrellon, dashing some vermouth 
off his golden mustaches, where he lay full-length on three 
chairs outside the Cafe in the Place du Gouvernement, where 
the lamps were just lit, and shining through the burnished 
moonlight of an Algerian evening, and the many-colored, many- 
raced, picturesque, and polyglot population of the town were 
all fluttering out with the sunset, like so many gay-colored 
moths. 

“ Hein ! Diamonds are found in the chiffonnier’s * sweep- 
ings,” growled a General of Division, who was the most terri- 
ble martinet in the whole of the French service, but who loved 
“ mes enfants d’enfer,” * as he was wont to term his men, with 
a great love, and who would never hear another disparage them, 
however he might order them blows of the matraque, or exile 
them to Beylick himself. 

“You are poetic, mon General,” said Claude de Chanrellon; 
“ but you are true. We are a furnace in which Blackguardism 
is burned into Dare-devilry, and turned out as Heroism. A fine 
manufacture that, and one at which France has no equal.” 

“ But our manufactures keep the original hall mark, and 
show that the devil made them if the drill have molded them ! ” 
urged a Colonel of Tirailleurs Indigenes. 

Chanrellon laughed, knocking the ash off a huge cigar. 

“Pardieu! We do our original maker credit then; nothing 
good in this world without a dash of diablerie. Scruples are the 
wet blankets, proprieties are the blank walls, principles are the 
quickset hedges of life, but devilry is its champagne ! ” 

“Ventre bleu!” growled the General. “We have a right to 
praise the blackguards; without them our conscripts would be 
very poor trash. The conscript fights because he has to fight; 
the blackguard fights because he loves to fight. A great differ- 
ence that.” 

* Rag-picker. 


254 


t“ My children of hell.’ 


CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE. 


255 


The Colonel of Tirailleurs lifted his eyes; a slight, pale, 
effeminate, dark-eyed Parisian, who looked scarcely stronger 
than a hot-house flower, yet who, as many an African chronicle 
could tell, was swift as fire, keen as steel, unerring as a leopard’s 
leap, untiring as an Indian on trail, once in the field with his 
Indigenes. 

“ In proportion as one loves powder, one has been a scoundrel, 
mon General,” he murmured ; “ what the catalogue of your 
crimes must be ! ” 

The tough old campaigner laughed grimly ; he took it as a 
high compliment. 

“ Sapristi ! The cardinal virtues don’t send anybody, I guess, 
into African service. And yet, pardieu, I don’t know. What 
fellows I have known ! I have- had men among my Zephyrs — 
and they were the wildest pratiques too — that would have ruled 
the world! I have had more wit, more address, more genius, 
more devotion, in some headlong scamp of a loustic than all 
the courts and cabinets would furnish. Such lives, such lives, 
too, morbleu ! ” 

And he drained his absinthe thoughtfully, musing on the 
marvelous vicissitudes of war, and on the patrician blood, the 
wasted wit, the Beaumarchais talent, the Mirabeau power, the 
adventures like a page of fairy tale, the brains whose strength 
could have guided a scepter, which he had found and known, 
hidden under the rough uniform of a Zephyr; buried beneath 
the canvas shirt of a Roumi; lost forever in the wild, lawless 
escapades of rebellious pratiques,* who closed their days in the 
stifling darkness of the dungeons of Beylick, or in some obscure 
skirmish, some midnight vedette, where an Arab flissa sev- 
ered the cord of the warped life, and the death was unhonored 
by even a line in the Gazettes du Jour. 

“ Faith ! ” laughed Chanrellon, regardless of the General’s ob- 
servation, “ if we all published our memoirs, the world would 
have a droll book. Dumas and Terrail would be beat out of 
the field. The real recruiting sergeants that send us to the 
ranks would be soon found to be ” 

“ Women ! ” growled the General. 

“ Cards,” sighed the Colonel. 

“Absinthe,” muttered another. 

“ Mussetism in a garret.” 

“Politics un peu trop fort.” 

* Insubordinates. 


256 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ A comedy that was hissed.” 

“ Carbonarist vows when one was a fool.” 

“ The spleen.” 

“ The dice.” 

“ The roulette.” 

“ The natural desire of humanity to kill and to get killed ! ” 

“ Morbleu ! ” cried Chanrellon, as the voices closed, “ all those 
mischiefs beat the drum, and send volunteers to the ranks, sure 
enough; but the General named the worst. Look at that little 
Cora; the Minister of War should give her the Cross. She 
sends us ten times more fire-eaters than the Conscription does. 
Five fine fellows — of the vieille roche too — joined to-day, be- 
cause she has stripped them of everything, and they have noth- 
ing for it but the service. She is invaluable, Cora.” 

“ And there is not much to look at in her either,” objected a 
captain, who commanded Turcos. “ I saw her when our de- 
tachment went to show in Paris. A baby face, innocent as a 
cherub — a soft voice — a shape that looks as slight and as break- 
able as the stem of my glass — there is the end ! ” 

The Colonel of Tirailleurs laughed scornfully, but gently; 
he had been a great lion of the fashionable world before he 
came out to his Indigenes. 

“ The end of Cora ! The end of her is — ‘ l’Enf er ! ’ My good 
Alcide — that ‘ baby face ’ has ruined more of us than would 
make up a battalion. She is so quiet, so tender; smiles like an 
angel, glides like a fawn; is a little sad too, the innocent dove; 
looks at you with eyes as clear as water, and paf ! before you 
know where you are, she has pillaged with both hands, and you 
wake one fine morning bankrupt ! ” 

“ Why do you let her do it ? ” growled the vieille moustache, 
who had served under Junot, when a little lad, and had scant 
knowledge of the ways and wiles of the sirens of the Rue 
Breda. 

“ Ah, bah ! ” said the Colonel, with a shrug of his shoulders ; 
“it is the thing to be ruined by Cora. There is Bebee-je- 
m’enfous; there is Blonde-Miou-Miou ; there is the Cerisette; 
there is Heroli; there is Loto — any one of them is equally good 
style with Cora ; but to be at all in the fashion, one must have 
been talked of with one of the six.” 

“ Diantre ! ” sighed Claude de Chanrellon, stretching his 
handsome limbs, with a sigh of recollection ; for Paris had been 
a Paradise Lost to him for many seasons, and he had had of 


CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE. 


257 


late years but one solitary glimpse of it. “ It was Cceur d’Acier 
who was the rage in my time. She ate me up — that woman — 
in three months. I had not a hundred francs left : she stripped 
me as bare as a pigeon. Her passion was emeralds en ca- 
bochon* just then. Well, emeralds en cabochon made an end 
of me, and sent me out here. Cceur d’Acier was a wonderful 
woman! — and the chief wonder of her was, that she was as 
ugly as sin.” 

“Ugly?” 

“ Ugly as sin ! But she had the knack of making herself 
more charming than Venus. How she did it nobody knew; but 
men left the prettiest creatures for her; and she ruined us, I 
think, at the rate of a score a month.” 

“ Like Loto,” chimed in the Tirailleur. “ Loto has not a 
shred of beauty. She is a big, angular, raw-boned Hormande, 
with a rough voice and a villainous patois; but to be well with 
Loto is to have achieved distinction at once. She will have 
nothing under the third order of nobility ; and Prince Paul shot 
the Due de Var about her the other day. She is a great crea- 
ture, Loto ; nobody knows her secret.” 

“L’audace, mon ami; toujours de l’audace!”* said Chan- 
rellon, with a twist of his superb mustaches. “ It is the finest 
quality out; nothing so sure to win. Hallo! there is le beau 
caporal listening. Ah! Bel-a-faire-peur, you fell, too, among 
the Lotos and the Occurs d’Acier once, I will warrant.” 

The Chasseur, who was passing, paused and smiled a little, 
as he saluted. 

“ Coeurs d’Acier are to be found in all ranks of the sex, 
monsieur, I fancy ! ” 

“ Bah ! you beg the question. Did not a woman send you out 
here — eh ? ” 

“ Ho, monsieur— only chance.” 

“ A fig for your chance! Women are the mischief that casts 
us adrift to chance.” 

“ Monsieur, we cast ourselves sometimes.” 

“ Dieu de Dieu! I doubt that. We should go straight enough 
if it were not for them.” 

The Chasseur smiled again. 

“ M. le Viscomte thinks we are sure to be right, then, if, for 
the key to every black story, we ask, < Who was she ? ’ ” 

* Emeralds uncut. * “ Audacity, my friend ! Always that ! ” 


258 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“Of course I do. Well! who was she? We are all quoting 
our tempters to-night. Give us your story, mon brave ! ” 

“ Monsieur, you have it in the folios matricules, as well as 
my sword could write it.” 

“ Good, good ! ” muttered the listening General. The soldier- 
like answer pleased him, and he looked attentively at the giver 
of it. 

Chanrellon’s brown eyes flashed a bright response. 

“ And your sword writes in a brave man’s fashion — writes 
what France loves to read. But before you wore your sword 
here? Tell us of that. It was a romance — wasn’t it? ” 

“ If it were, I have folded down the page, monsieur.” 

“ Open it then ! Come — what brought you out among us ? 
You had gamed au roi depouillee — that was it? Out with 
it!” 

“ Monsieur, direct obedience is a soldier’s duty ; but I never 
heard that inquisitive annoyance was an officer’s privilege.” 

These words were calm, cold, a little languid, and a little 
haughty. The manner of old habit, the instinct of buried pride 
spoke in them, and disregarded the barrier between a private 
of Chasseurs who was but a sous-officier, and a Colonel Com- 
mandant who was also a noble of France. 

Involuntarily, all the men sitting round the little tables, out- 
side the cafe, turned and looked at him. The boldness of 
speech and the quietude of tone drew all their eyes in curiosity 
upon him. 

Chanrellon flushed scarlet over his frank brow, and an in- 
stant’s passion gleamed out of his eyes; the next he threw his 
three chairs down with a crash, as he shook his mighty frame 
like an Alpine dog, and bowed with a French grace, with a 
campaigner’s frankness. 

“ A right rebuke ! — fairly given, and well 'deserved. I thank 
you for the lesson.” 

The Chasseur looked surprised and moved; in truth, he was 
more touched than he showed. Under the rule of Chateauroy, 
consideration and courtesy had been things long unshown to 
him. Involuntarily, forgetful of rank, he stretched his hand out, 
on the impulse of soldier to soldier, of gentleman to gentleman. 
Then, as the bitter remembrance of the difference of rank and 
station between them flashed on his memory, he was raising 
it proudly, deferentially, in the salute of a subordinate to his 
superior, when Chanrellon’s grasp closed on it readily. The 


/ 


CIGARETTE EN BIEOTAITRICE. 


259 


victim of Cceur d’Arcier was of as gallant a temper as ever 
blent the reckless condottiere with the thoroughbred noble. 

The Chasseur colored slightly, as he remembered that he had 
forgotten alike his own position and their relative stations. 

“ I beg your pardon, M. le Viscomte,” he said simply, as he 
gave the salute with ceremonious grace, and passed onward 
rapidly, as though he wished to forget and to have forgotten 
the momentary self-oblivion of which he had been guilty. 

“ Dieu ! ” muttered Chanrellon, as he looked after him, and 
struck his hand on the marble-topped table till the glasses 
shook. “ I would give a year’s pay to know that fine fellow’s 
history. He is a gentleman — every inch of him.” 

“ And a good soldier, which is better,” growled the General 
of Brigade, who had begun life in his time driving an ox-plow 
over the heavy tillage of Alsace. 

“ A private of Chateauroy’s — eh ? ” asked the Tirailleur, lift- 
ing his eye-glass to watch the Chasseur as he went. 

“ Pardieu — yes — more’s the pity,” said Chanrellon, who spoke 
his thoughts as hastily as a hand-grenade scatters its powder. 
“ The Black Hawk hates him — God knows why — and he is kept 
down in consequence, as if he were the idlest lout or the most 
incorrigible rebel in the service. Look at what he has done. 
All the Bureaux will tell you there is not a finer Roumi in 
Africa — not even among our Schaouacks! Since he joined, 
there has not been a hot and heavy thing with the Arabs that 
he has not had his share in. There has not been a campaign in 
Oran or Kabaila that he has not gone out with. His limbs are 
slashed all over with Bedouin steel. He rode once twenty 
leagues to deliver dispatches with a spear-head in his side, and 
fell, in a dead faint, out of his saddle just as he gave them up 
to the commandant’s own hands. He saved the day, two years 
ago, at Granaila. We should have been cut to pieces, as sure 
as destiny, if he had not collected a handful of broken Chasseurs 
together, and rallied them, and rated them, and lashed them 
with their shame, till they dashed with him to a man into the 
thickest of the fight, and pierced the Arabs’ center, and gave 
us breathing room, till we all charged together, and beat the 
Arbicos back like a herd of jackals. There are a hundred more 
like stories of him — every one of them true as my saber — and, 
in reward, he has just been made a galonne!” 

“ Superb ! ” said the General, with grim significance “ Ce 
n’est pas a la France — §a! Twelve years! In five under Ha- 


260 


TJNDEE TWO FLAGS. 


poleon, he would have been at the head of a brigade ; but then ” 
— and the veteran drank his absinthe with a regretful melan- 
choly — “ but then, Napoleon read his men himself and never 
read them wrong. It is a divine gift that for commanders.” 

“ The Black Hawk can read, too,” said Chanrellon medi- 
tatively ; it was the “ petit nom,” that Chateauroy had gained 
long before, and by which he was best known through the army. 
“ No eyes are keener than his to trace a lascar kebir. But, 
where he hates, he strikes beak and talons — pong! — till the 
thing drops dead — even where he strikes a bird of his own 
brood.” 

“ That is bad,” said the old General sententiously. “ There 
are four people who should have no personal likes or dislikes: 
they are an innkeeper, a schoolmaster, a ship’s skipper, and a 
military chief.” 

With which axiom he called for some more vert-vert. 

Meanwhile, the Chasseur went his way through the cosmo- 
politan groups of the great square. A little farther onward, 
laughing, smoking, chatting, eating ices outside a Cafe 
Chantant, were a group of Englishmen — a yachting party, 
whose schooner lay in the harbor. He lingered a moment, and 
lighted a fusee, just for the sake of hearing the old familiar 
words. As he bent his head above the vesuvian, no one saw 
the shadow of pain that passed over his face. 

But one of them looked at him curiously and earnestly. 
“ The deuce,” he murmured to the man nearest him, “ who the 
dickens is it that French soldier’s like?” 

The French soldier heard, and, with the cigar in his teeth, 
moved away quickly. He was uneasy in the city — uneasy lest 
he should be recognized by any passer-by or tourist. 

“ I need not fear that, though,” he thought with a smile. 
“ Ten years ! — why, in that world, we used to forget the black- 
est ruin in ten days, and the best life among us ten hours after 
its grave was closed. Besides, I am safe enough. I am 
dead!” 

And he pursued his onward way, with the red glow of the 
cigar under the chestnut splendor of his beard, and the black 
eyes of veiled Moresco women flashed lovingly on his tall, lithe 
form, with the scarlet ceinturon swathed round his loins, and 
the scarlet undress fez set on his forehead, fair as a woman’s 
still, despite of the tawny glow of Hie Afric sun, that had been 
on it for so long. 







CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE. 


261 


He was “dead”; therein had lain all his security; thereby 
had “ Beauty of the Brigades ” been buried beyond all discov- 
ery in “ Bel-a-faire-peur ” of the 2d Chasseurs d’Afrique. 
When, on the Marseilles rails, the maceration and slaughter of 
as terrible an accident as ever befell a train rushing through 
midnight darkness, at headlong speed, had left himself and 
the one man faithful to his fortunes unharmed by little less 
than a miracle; he had seen in the calamity the surest screen 
from discovery or pursuit. 

Leaving the baggage where it was jammed among the debris, 
he had struck across the country with Bake for the few leagues 
that still lay between them and the city, and had entered Mar- 
seilles as "weary foot travelers, before half the ruin on the rails 
had been seen by the full noon sun. 

As it chanced a trading yawl was loading in the port, to run 
across to Algiers that very day. The skipper was short of men, 
and afraid of the Lascars, who were the only sailors that he 
seemed likely to find to fill up the vacant places in his small 
crew. 

Cecil offered himself and his comrade for the passage. He 
had only a very few gold pieces on his person, and he was will- 
ing to -work his way across, if he could. 

“ But you’re a gentleman,” said the skipper, doubtfully eying 
him, and his velvet dress, and his black sombrero with its 
eagle’s plume. “ I want a rare, rough, able seaman, for there’ll 
be like to be foul weather. She looks too fair to last,” he con- 
cluded, with a glance upward at the sky. 

He was a Liverpool man, master and owner of his own 
rakish-looking little black-hulled craft, that, rumor was wont 
to say, was not averse to a bit of slaving, if she found herself 
in far seas, with a likely run before her. 

“ You’re a swell, that’s what you are,” emphasized the 
skipper. “ You bean’t no sort of use to me.” 

“ Wait a second/’ answered Cecil. “ Did you ever chance 
to hear of a schooner called ‘ Begina ’ ? ” 

The skipper’s face lighted in a moment. 

“Her as was in the Biscay, July come two years? her as 
druv’ through the storm like a mad thing, and flew like a swal- 
low, when everything was splittin’ and founderin’, and ship- 
ping seas around her? her as was the first to bear down to the 
great ‘Wrestler,’ a-lyin’ there hull over in water, and took 
aboard all as ever she could hold o’ the passengers; a-pitchin’ 


262 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


out her own beautiful cabin fittin’s to have as much room for 
the poor wretches as ever she could ? Be you a-meanin’ her ? ” 

Cecil nodded assent. 

“ She was my yacht, that’s all ; and I was without a captain 
through that storm. Will you think me a good enough sailor 
now ? ” 

The skipper wrung his hand till he nearly wrung it off. 

“ Good enough ! Blast my timbers ! there aren’t one will beat 
you in any waters. Come on, sir, if so be as you wishes it ; but 
never a stroke of work shall you do atween my decks. I never 
did think as how one of your yachting-nobs could ever be fit 
to lay hold of a tiller; but, hang me, if the Club make such 
sailors as you it’s a rare ’un ! Lord a mercy ! why, my wife was 
in the ‘Wrestler.’ I’ve heard her tell scores of times as how 
she was a’most dead when that little yacht came through a 
swaling sea, that was all heavin’ and roarin’ round the wreck, 
and as how the swell what owned it gev’ his cabin up to the 
womenkind, and had his swivel guns and his handsome furni- 
ture pitched overboard, that he might be able to carry more 
passengers, and fed ’em, and gev’ ’em champagne all around, 
and treated ’em like a prince, till he ran ’em straight into Brest 
Harbor. But, damn me ! that ever a swell like you should ” 

“ Let’s weigh anchor,” said Bertie quietly. 

And so he crossed unnoticed to Algeria, while through Europe 
the tidings went that the mutilated form, crushed between iron 
and wood, on the Marseilles line, was his, and that he had per- 
ished in that awful, ink-black, sultry southern night, when the 
rushing trains had met, as meet the thunder-clouds. The 
world thought him dead; as such the journals recorded him, 
with the shameful outlines of imputed crime, to make the death 
the darker; as such his name was forbidden to be uttered at 
Boyallieu; as such the Seraph mourned him with passionate, 
loving force, refusing to the last to accredit his guilt: — and 
he, leaving them in their error, was drafted into the French 
army under two of his Christian names, which happily had a 
foreign sound — Louis Victor — and laid aside forever his iden- 
tity as Bertie Cecil. 

He went at once on service in the interior, and had scarcely 
come in any of the larger towns since he had joined. His 
only danger of recognition had been once when a Marshal of 
France, whom he had used to know well in Paris and at the 
court of St. James, held an inspection of the African troops. 


CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE. 


263 


Filing past the brilliant staff, he had ridden at only a few 
yards’ distance from his old acquaintance, and, as he saluted, 
had glanced involuntarily at the face that he had seen often- 
times in the Salles des Marechaux, and even under the roof of 
Royallieu. The great chief’s keen blue eyes were scrutinizing 
the regiment, ready to note a chain loose, a belt awry, a sword 
specked with rust, if such a sin there were against “ les ordon- 
nances ” in all the glittering squadrons ; and swept over him, 
seeing in him but one among thousands — a unit in the mighty 
aggregate of the “ raw material ” of war. 

The Marshal only muttered to a General beside him, “ Why 
don’t they all ride like that man ? He has the seat of the Eng- 
lish Guards.” But that it was in truth an officer of the Eng- 
lish Guards, and a friend of his own, who paced past him as 
a private of Algerian Horse, the French leader never dreamed. 

From the extremes of luxury, indolence, indulgence, pleas- 
ure, and extravagance, Cecil came to the extremes of hardship, 
poverty, discipline, suffering, and toil. From a life where every 
sense was gratified, he came to a life where every privation was 
endured. He had led the fashion; he came where he had to 
bear without a word the curses, oaths, and insults of a corporal 
or a sous-lieutenant. He had been used to every delicacy and 
delight; he came where he had to take the coarse black bread 
of the army as a rich repast. He had thought it too much 
trouble to murmur flatteries in great ladies’ ears; he came 
where morning, noon, and night the inexorable demands of 
rigid rules compelled his incessant obedience, vigilance, activ- 
ity, and self-denial. He had known nothing from his child- 
hood up except an atmosphere of amusement, refinement, bril- 
liancy, and idleness ; he came where gnawing hunger, brutalized 
jest, ceaseless toil, coarse obscenity, agonized pain, and pande- 
monaic mirth alternately filled the measure of the days. 

A sharper contrast, a darker ordeal, rarely tried the steel 
of any man’s endurance; yet, under it, he verified the truth, 
“ Bon sang ne peut mentir.” Ho Spartan could have borne the 
change more mutely, more stanchly, than did the “ dandy of the 
Household.” 

The first years were, it is true, years of intense misery to 
him. Misery, when all the blood glowed in him under some 
petty tyrant’s jibe, and he had to stand immovable, holding 
his peace. Misery, when the hunger and thirst of long marches 
tortured him, and his soul sickened at the half-raw offal, and 


264 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


the water thick with dust, and stained with blood, which the 
men round him seized so ravenously. Misery, when the dreary 
dawn broke, only to usher in a day of mechanical maneuvers, 
of petty tyrannies, of barren, burdensome hours in the exercise- 
ground, of convoy duty in the burning sun-glare, and under 
the heat of harness ; and the weary night fell with the din and 
uproar, and the villainous blasphemy and befouled merriment 
of the riotous Chambree, that denied even the peace and 
oblivion of sleep. They were years of infinite wretchedness 
oftentimes, only relieved by the loyalty and devotion of the 
man who had followed him into his exile. But, however 
wretched, they never wrung a single regret or lament from 
Cecil. He had come out to this life; he took it as it was. As, 
having lost the title to command, the high breeding in him 
made him render implicitly the mute obedience which was the 
first duty of his present position, so it made him accept, from 
first to last, without a sign of complaint or of impatience, the 
altered fortunes of his career. The hardest-trained, lowest-born, 
longest-inured soldier in the Zephyr ranks did not bear himself 
with more apparent content and more absolute fortitude than 
did the man who had used to think it a cruelty to ride with his 
troop from Windsor to Wormwood Scrubs, and had never taken 
the trouble to load his own gun any shooting season, or to draw 
off his own coat any evening. He suffered acutely many times ; 
suffered till he was heart-sick of his life; but he never sought 
to escape the slightest penalty or hardship, and not even Rake 
ever heard from him a single syllable of irritation or of self-pity. 

Moreover, the war-fire woke in him. 

In one shape or another active service was almost always his 
lot, and hot, severe campaigning was his first introduction to 
military life in Algeria. The latent instinct in him — the in- 
stinct that had flashed out during his lazy, fashionable calm in 
all moments of danger, in all days of keen sport; the instinct 
that had made him fling himself into the duello with the 
French boar, and made him mutter to Forest King, “Kill me 
if you like, but don’t fail me ! ” — was the instinct of the born 
soldier. In peril, in battle, in reckless bravery, in the rush 
of the charge and the excitement of the surprise, in the near 
presence of death, and in the chase of a foe through a hot 
African night when both were armed to the teeth, and one 
or both must fall when the grapple came — in all these that 
old instinct, aroused and unloosed, made him content; made 


CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE. 265 

him think that the life which brought them was worth the 
living. 

There had always been in him a reckless dare-devilry, which 
had slept under the serene, effeminate insouciance of his care- 
less temper and his pampered habits. It had full rein now, 
and made him, as the army affirmed, one of the most intrepid, 
victorious, and chivalrous lascars of its fiery ranks. Fate had 
flung him off his couch of down into the tempest of war; into 
the sternness of life spent ever on the border of the grave; 
ruled ever by an iron code, requiring at every step self -nega- 
tion, fortitude, submission, courage, patience; the self-control 
wdiich should take the uttermost provocation from those in 
command without even a look of reprisal, and the courageous 
recklessness which should meet death and deal death; which 
should be as the eagle to swoop, as the lion to rend. And he 
was not found wanting in it. 

He was too thoroughbred to attempt to claim a superiority 
that fortune no longer conferred on him; to seek to obtain a 
deference that he had no longer the position to demand. He 
obeyed far more implicitly than many a ruffian filibuster, who 
had been among the dregs of society from his birth. And 
though his quick-eyed comrades knew, before he had been 
among them five minutes, that an “ aristocrat ” had taken ref- 
uge under the Flag of Mazagran, they never experienced from 
him one touch of the insolence that their own sous-officiers beat 
them with, as with the fiat of the sword; and they never found 
in him one shadow of the arrogance that some fellow-soldier, 
who had swelled into a sergeant-major, or bristled into an 
adjutant, would strut with, like any turkey-cock. 

He was too quiet, too courteous, too calmly listless; he had 
too easy a grace, too soft a voice, and too many gentleman 
habits, for them. But when the^ found that he could fight 
like a Zouave, ride like an Arab, and bear shot- wounds or 
desert-thirst as though he were of bronze, it grew a delight to 
them to see of what granite and steel this dainty patrician was 
made; and they loved him with a rough, ardent, dog-like love, 
when they found that his last crust, in a long march, would 
always be divided; that the most desperate service of danger 
was always volunteered for by him; that no severity of per- 
sonal chastisement ever made him clear himself of a false 
charge at a comrade’s expense; and that all his decompte went 
in giving a veteran a stoup of wine, or a sick conscript a tempt- 


266 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


ing meal, or a prisoner of Beylick some food through the grat- 
ing, scaled too at risk of life and limb. 

Cecil had all a soldier’s temper in him; and the shock which 
had hurled him out of ease, and levity, and ultra-luxury, to 
stand alone before as dark and rugged a fortune as ever fronted 
any man, had awakened the war fire which had only slumbered 
because lulled by habit and unaroused by circumstance. He had 
never before been called on to exert either thought or action; 
the necessity for both called many latent qualities in him into 
play. The same nature, which had made him wish to be killed 
over the Grand Military course, rather than live to lose the 
race, made him now bear privation as calmly, and risk death 
as recklessly, as the hardiest and most fiery loustic of the Afri- 
can cantonments. 

Bitter as the life often was, severe the suffering, and acute 
the deprivation, the sternest veteran scarcely took them more 
patiently, more silently, than the “ aristocrat,” to whom a corked 
claret or a dusty race day had been calamities. Cast among 
these wild, iron-muscled Bohemians, who fought like tigers, 
and were as impenetrable as rhinoceri, “ race ” was too strong 
in Cecil not to hold its own with them, whether in the quality 
of endurance or the quality of daring. 

“ Main de femme, mais main de fer,” the Rounds were wont 
to say of their comrade, with his delicate habits ; “ comme une 
Marquise du F aubourg,” as they would growl impatiently ; and 
his tenacious patience which would never give way either in 
the toil of the camp or the grip of the struggle. 

On the surface it seemed as though never was there a life 
more utterly thrown away than the life of a Guardsman and a 
gentleman, a man of good blood, high rank, and talented gifts 
—had he ever chosen to make anything of them — buried in the 
ranks of the Franco- African army; risking a nameless grave in 
the sand with almost every hour, associated with the roughest 
riffraff of Europe, liable any day to be slain by the slash of an 
Arab flissa, and rewarded for ten years’ splendid service by 
the distinctive badge of a corporal. Any one of the friends of 
his former years, seeing him thus, would have said that he 
might as well be thrown at once into a pit in the sand, where 
the dead were piled twenty deep after a skirmish, to lie and rot, 
or be dug up by the talons of famished beasts — whichever 
might chance — as live thus in the obscurity, poverty, and semi- 
barbarism of an Algerian private’s existence. 


CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE. 


267 


Yet it might be doubted if any life would have done for him 
what this had done; it might be questioned if, judging a career 
not by its social position, but by its effect on character, any 
other would have been so well for him, or would equally have 
given steel and strength to the indolence and languor of his 
nature as this did. In his old world he would have lounged 
listlessly through fashionable seasons, and in an atmosphere 
that encouraged his profound negligence of everything ; and his 
natural nil-admirari listlessness would have glided from refine- 
ment to effeminacy, and from lazy grace to blase inertia. 

The severity and the dangers of the campaigns with the 
French army had roused the sleeping lion in him, and made 
him as fine a soldier as ever ranged under any flag. He had 
suffered, braved, resented, fought, loved, hated, endured, and 
even enjoyed, here in Africa, with a force and a vividness that 
he had never dreamed possible in his calm, passionless, in- 
souciant world of other days. He had known what the hunger 
of famine, what the torment of fever, what the agony of for- 
bidden pride, what the wild delight of combat were. He had 
known what it was to long madly for a stoup of water; to lie 
raving, yet conscious, under the throes of gunshot wounds; to 
be forced to bear impassively words for a tithe of which he 
could have struck across the mouth the chief who spoke them; 
to find in a draught of wretched wine, after days of marching, 
a relish that he had never found in the champagnes and bur- 
gundies of the Guards’ mess; to love the dark Arab eyes, that 
smiled on him in his exile, as he had never loved those of any 
woman, and to suffer when the death-film gathered over them 
as he had never thought it in him to suffer for any death or 
any life; to feel every nerve thrill and every vein glow with 
fierce, exultant joy as the musketry pealed above the plains, 
and his horse pressed down on to the very mouths of the rifles, 
and the naked sabers flashed like the play of lightnings, and, 
over the dead body of his charger, he fought ankle-deep in 
blood, with the Arabs circling like hawks, and their great 
blades whirling round him; catching the spears aimed at him 
with one hand, while he beat back their swords, blow for blow, 
with the other — he had known all these, the desert passions; 
and while outwardly they left him much the same in char- 
acter, they changed him vitally. They developed him into a 
magnificent soldier — too true a soldier not to make thoroughly 
his the service he had adopted ; not to, oftentimes, almost forget 


2H8 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


that he had ever lived under any other flag than that tricolor 
which he followed and defended now. 

The quaint, heroic Norman motto of his ancestors, carved 
over the gates of Royallieu — “ Coeur V aillant Se F ait Roy- 
aume ” — verified itself in his case. Outlawed, beggared, robbed 
at a stroke of every hope and prospect — he had taken his ad- 
versity boldly by the beard, and had made himself at once a 
country and a kingdom among the brave, fierce, reckless, loyal 
hearts of the men who came from north, south, east, and west — 
driven by every accident, and scourged by every fate — to fill up 
the battalions of North Africa. 

As he went now, in the warmth of the after-glow, he turned 
up into the Rue Babazoum, and paused before the entrance 
of a narrow, dark, tumble-down, picturesque shop, half like 
a stall of a Cairo bazaar, half like a Jew’s den in a Florentine 
alley. * 

A cunning, wizen head peered out at him from the gloom. 

“Ah, ha! Good-even, Corporal Victor!” 

Cecil, at the words, crossed the sill and entered. 

“ Have you sold any ? ” he asked. There was a slight con- 
straint and hesitation in the words, as of one who can never 
fairly bend his spirit to the yoke of barter. 

The little, hideous, wrinkled, dwarf -like creature, a trader in 
curiosities, grinned with a certain gratification in disappoint- 
ing this lithe-limbed, handsome Chasseur. 

“ Not one. The toys don’t take. Daggers now, or anything 
made out of spent balls, or flissas one can tell an Arab story 
about, go off like wild-fire; but your ivory bagatelles are no 
sort of use, M. le Caporal.” 

“ Very well — no matter,” said Cecil simply, as he paused a 
moment before some delicate little statuettes and carvings — 
miniature things, carved out of a piece of ivory, or a block of 
marble the size of a horse’s hoof, such as could be picked up in 
dry river channels or broken off stray bowlders; slender cruci- 
fixes, wreaths of foliage, branches of wild fig, figures of Arabs 
and Moors, dainty heads of dancing-girls, and tiny chargers 
fretting like Bucephalus. They were perfectly conceived and 
executed. He had always had a D’Orsay-like gift that way, 
though, in common with all his gifts, he had utterly neglected 
all culture of it, until, cast adrift on the world, and forced to 
do something to maintain himself, he had watched the skill of 
the French soldiers at all such expedients to gain a few coins, 


CIGAKETTE EN BIENFA1TKICE. 


269 


and had solaced many a dreary hour in barracks and under 
canvas with the toy-sculpture, till he had attained a singular 
art at it. He had commonly given Rake the office of selling 
them, and as commonly spent all the proceeds on all other needs 
save his own. 

He lingered a moment, with regret in his eyes; he had 
scarcely a sou in his pocket, and he had wanted some money 
sorely that night for a comrade dying of a lung-wound — a noble 
fellow, a French artist, who, in an evil hour of desperation, had 
joined the army, with a poet’s temper that made its hard, 
colorless routine unendurable, and had been shot in the chest 
in a night-skirmish. 

“You will not buy them yourself?” he asked at length, the 
color flushing in his face; he would not have pressed the ques- 
tion to save his own life from starving, but Leon Ramon would 
have no chance of fruit or a lump of ice to cool his parched 
lips and still his agonized retching, unless he himself could 
get money to buy those luxuries that are too splendid and too 
merciful to be provided for a dying soldier, who knows so little 
of his duty to his country as to venture to die in his bed. 

“ Myself ! ” screeched the dealer, with a derisive laugh. “ Ask 
me to give you my whole stock next, M. le Galonne! These 
trumperies will lie on hand for a year.” 

Cecil went out of the place without a word ; his thoughts were 
with Leon Ramon, and the insolence scarce touched him. 
“ How shall I get him the ice ? ” he wondered. “ God ! if I had 
only one of the lumps that used to float in our claret cup ! ” 

As he left the den, a military fairy, all gay with blue and 
crimson, like the fuchsia bell she most resembled, with a 
meerschaum in her scarlet lips and a world of wrath in her 
bright black eyes, dashed past him into the darkness within, 
and before the dealer knew or dreamed of her, tossed up the old 
man’s little shriveled frame like a shuttlecock, shook him till 
he shook like custards, flung him upward and caught him as if 
he were the hoop in a game of La Grace, and set him down 
bruised, breathless, and terrified out of his wits. 

“ Ah, chenapan ! ” cried Cigarette, with a volley of slang ut- 
terly untranslatable, “ that is how you treat your betters, is it ? 
Miser, monster, crocodile, serpent! Harpagon was an angel to 
you.” (She knew Harpagon because some of her Roumis chat- 
tered bits of Moliere.) “ He wanted the money and you refused 
it ? Ah — h — h ! son of Satan ! you live on other men’s miseries ! 


270 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


Run after him, quick — and give him this, and this, and this, 
and this; and say you were only in jest, and that the things 
were worth a Sheik’s ransom. Stay ! you must not give him too 
much, or he will know it is not you — viper! Run quick, and 
breathe a word about me, if you dare; one whisper only, and 
my Spahis shall cut your throat from ear to ear. Off! or you 
shall have a bullet to quicken your steps; misers dance well 
when pistols play the minuet ! ” 

With which exordium the little Amie du Drapeau shook her 
culprit at every epithet, emptied out a shower of gold and silver, 
just won at play, from the bosom of her uniform, forced it into 
the dealer’s hands, hurled him out of his own door, and drew 
her pretty weapon with a clash from her sash. 

“Run for your life! — and do just what I bid you; or a shot 
shall crash your skull in as sure as my name is Cigarette ! ” 
The little old Jew flew as fast as his limbs would carry him, 
clutching the coins in his horny hands. He was terrified to 
a mortal anguish, and had not a thought of resisting or dis- 
obeying her; he knew the fame of Cigarette — as who did not? 
Knew that she would fire at a man as carelessly as at a cat, — 
more carelessly, in truth, — for she favored cats; saving many 
from going into the Zouaves’ soup-caldrons, and favored 
civilians not at all; and knew that at her rallying cry all the 
sabers about the town would be drawn without a second’s de- 
liberation, and sheathed in anything or anybody that had of- 
fended her, for Cigarette was, in her fashion, Generalissima of 
all the Regiments of Africa. 

The dealer ran with all the speed of terror, and overtook 
Cecil, who was going slowly onward to the barracks. 

“ Are you serious ? ” he asked in surprise at the large amount, 
as the little Jew panted out apologies, entreaties, and protesta- 
tions of his only having been in jest, and of his fervently de- 
siring to buy the carvings at his own price, as he knew of a 
great collector in Paris to whom he needed to send them. 

“ Serious ! Indeed am I serious, M. le Caporal,” pleaded the 
curiosity-trader, turning his head in agonized fear to see if the 
vivandiere’s pistol was behind him. “ The things will be worth 
a great deal to me where I shall send them, and though they 
are but bagatelles, what is Paris itself but one bagatelle? 
Pouf! they are all children there — they will love the toys. 
Take the money, I pray you ; take the money ! ” 

Cecil looked at him a moment; he saw the man was in ear- 


CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE. 


271 


nest, and thought but little of his repentance and trepidation, 
for the citizens were all afraid of slighting or annoying a 
soldier. 

“ So be it. Thank you,” he said, as he stretched out his 
hand and took the coins, not without a keen pang of the old 
pride that would not wholly be stilled, yet gladly for sake of 
the Chasseur dying yonder, growing delirious and retching the 
blood oif his lungs in want of one touch of the ice, that was 
spoiled by the ton weight, to keep cool the wines and the fish 
of M. le Marquis de Chateauroy. And he went onward to 
spend the gold his sculptures had brought on some yellow figs 
and some cool golden grapes, and some ice-chilled wines that 
should soothe a little of the pangs of dissolution to his com- 
rade, and bear him back a moment, if only in some fleeting 
dream, to the vine shadows and the tossing seas of corn, and 
the laughing, sunlit sweetness of his own fair country by the 
blue Biscayan waves. 

“You did it? That is well. Now, see here — one word of 
me, now or ever after, and there is a little present that will 
come to you, hot and quick, from Cigarette,” said the little 
Friend of the Flag, with a sententious sternness that crushed 
each word deliberately through her tight-set, pearly teeth. The 
unhappy Jew shuddered and shut his eyes as she held a bullet 
close to his sight, then dropped it with an ominous thud in her 
pistol barrel. 

“Not a syllable, never a syllable,” he stammered; “and if 
I had knbwn you were in love with him, ma belle ” 

A box on the ears sent him across his own counter. 

“ In love ? Parbleu ! I detest the fellow ! ” said Cigarette, 
with fiery scorn and as hot an oath. 

“Truly? Then why give your Napoleons ” began the 

bruised and stammering Israelite. 

Cigarette tossed back her pretty head, that was curly and 
spirited and shapely as any thoroughbred spaniel’s; a superb 
glance flashed from her eyes, a superb disdain sat on her lips. 

“ You are a Jew trader; you know nothing of our code under 
the tricolor. We — nous autres soldats — are too proud not to 
aid even an enemy when he is in the right, and France always 
arms for justice!” 

With which magnificent peroration she swept all the carvings 
— they were rightfully hers — off the table. 

“ They will light my cooking fire ! ” she said contemptuously, 


272 


TINDER TWO FLAGS. 


as she vaulted lightly over the counter into the street, and 
pirouetted like a bit of fantoccini, that is wound up to waltz for- 
ever, along the slope of the crowded Babazoum. All made way 
for her, even the mighty Spahis and the trudging Bedouin 
mules, for all knew that if they did not she would make it for 
herself, over their heads or above their prostrated bodies. 

She whirled her way, like a gay-colored top set humming 
down a road, through the divers motley groups, singing at 
the top of her sweet, mirthful voice, for she was angry with 
herself; and, for that, sang the more loudly the most wicked 
and risque of her slang songs, that gave the morals of a Mes- 
salina in the language of a fish-wife, and yet had an inalienable, 
mischievous, contagious, dauntless French grace in it withal. 
Finally, she whirled herself into a dark, deserted Moresco arch- 
way, a little out of the town, and dropped on a stone block, as 
a swallow, tired of flight, drops on to a bough. 

“ Is that the way I revenge myself? Ah, bah! I deserve to 
be killed ! When he called me unsexed — unsexed — unsexed ! ” — 
and with each repetition of the infamous word, so bitter because 
vaguely admitted to be true, with her cheeks scarlet and her 
eyes aflame, and her hands clinched, she flung one of the ivory 
wreaths on to the pavement and stamped on it with her spurred 
heel until the carvings were ground into powdered fragments — 
stamped, as though it were a living foe, and her steel-bound 
foot were treading out all its life with burning hate and piti- 
less venom. 

In the act her passion exhausted itself, as the evil of such 
warm, impetuous, tender natures will; she was very still, and 
looked at the ruin she had done with regret and a touch of 
contrition. 

“ It was very pretty — and cost him weeks of labor, perhaps,” 
she thought. 

Then she took all the rest up, one by one, and gazed at them. 
Things of beauty had had but little place in her lawless young 
life; what she thought beautiful was a regiment sweeping out 
in full sunlight, with its eagles, and its colors, and its kettle- 
drums ; what she held as music was the beat of the reveille and 
the mighty roll of the great artillery; what made her pulse 
throb and her heart leap was to see two fine opposing forces 
draw near for the onslaught and thunder of battle. Of things 
of grace she had no heed, though she had so much grace her- 
self; and her life, though full of color, pleasure, and mischief, 


CIGARETTE EN BIENF A ITRICE. 273 

was as rough a one in most respects as any of her comrades’. 
These delicate artistic carvings were a revelation to her. 

Here was the slender pliant spear of the river-reed; here the 
rich foliage of the wild fig tree ; here the beautiful blossom of 
the oleander; here fruit, and flower, and vine-leaf, and the 
pendulous ears of millet, twined together in their ivory sem- 
blance till they seemed to grow beneath her hands — and those 
little hands looked so brown and so powder-stained beside the 
pure snow- whiteness of the wreaths! She touched them rev- 
erently one by one; all the carvings had their beauty for her, 
but those of the flowers had far the most. She had never noted 
any flowers in her life before, save those she strung together 
for the Zephyrs on the Jour de Mazagran. Her youth was a 
military ballad, rhymed vivaciously to the rhythm of the Pas 
*de Charge ; but other or softer poetry had never by any chance 
touched her until now — now that in her tiny, bronzed, war- 
hardened palms lay the white foliage, the delicate art-trifles of 
this Chasseur, who bartered his talent to get a touch of ice for 
the burning lips of his doomed comrade. 

“ He is an aristocrat — he has such gifts as this — and yet he 
a Jew’s pittance, and must sell all this beauty to get a slice of 
melon for Leon Pamon ! ” she thought, while the silvery moon 
strayed in through a broken arch, and fell on an ivory coil of 
twisted lentiscus leaves and river grasses. 

And, lost in a musing pity, Cigarette forgot her vow of 
vengeance. 


CHAPTER XIX. 


THE IVORY SQUADRONS. 

The Chambree of the Chasseurs was bright and clean in the 
morning light; in common with all Algerian barrack rooms as 
unlike the barrack rooms of the ordinary army as Cigarette, 
with her debonnaire devilry, smoking on a gun-wagon, was 
unlike a trim Normandy soubrette, sewing on a bench in the 
Tuileries gardens. 

Disorder reigned supreme; but Disorder, although a dishev- 
eled goddess, is very often a picturesque one, and more of an 
artist than her better-trained sisters; and the disorder was 
brightened with a thousand vivid colors and careless touches 
that blent in confusion to enchant a painter’s eyes. The room 
was crammed with every sort of spoil that the adventurous, 
pillaging temper of the troopers could forage from Arab tents, 
or mountain caves, or river depths, or desert beasts and birds. 
All things, from tiger skins to birds’ nests, from Bedouin 
weapons to ostrich eggs, from a lion’s mighty coat to a tobacco- 
stopper chipped out of a morsel of deal, were piled together, 
pell-mell, or hung against the whitewashed walls, or suspended 
by cords from bed to bed. Everything that ingenuity and hardi- 
hood, prompted by the sharp spur of hunger, could wrest from 
the foe, from the country, from earth or water, from wild 
beasts or riven rock, were here in the midst of the soldiers’ 
regimental pallets and regimental arms, making the Chambree 
at once atelier, storehouse, workshop, and bazaar; while the 
men, cross-legged on their little hard couches, worked away 
with the zest of those who work for the few coins that alone 
will get them the food, the draught of wine, the hour’s mirth 
and indulgence at the estaminet, to which they look across the 
long, stern probation of discipline and maneuver. 

Skill, grace, talent, invention whose mother was necessity, 
and invention that was the unforced offshoot of natural genius, 
were all at work ; and the hands that could send the naked steel 
down at a blow through turban and through brain could shape, 
with a woman’s ingenuity, with a craftsman’s skill, every quaint 

274 


THE IVORY SQUADRONS. 


275 


device and dainty bijou from stone and wood, and many- 
colored feathers, and mountain berries, and all odds and ends 
that chance might bring to hand, and that the women of 
Bedouin tribes or the tourists of North Africa might hereafter 
buy with a wondrous tale appended to them — racy and marvel- 
ous as the Sapir slang and the military imagination could 
weave — to enhance the toys’ value, and get a few coins more 
on them for their manufacture. 

Ignorance jostled art, and bizarrerie ran hand in hand with 
talent, in all the products of the Chasseurs’ extemporized 
studio ; but nowhere was there ever clumsiness, and everywhere 
was there an industry, gay, untiring, accustomed to make the 
best of the worst ; the workers laughing, chattering, singing, in 
all good-fellowship, while the fingers that gave the dead thrust 
held the carver’s chisel, and the eyes that glared blood-red in 
the heat of battle twinkled mischievously over the meerschaum 
bowl, in whose grinning form some great chief of the Bureau- 
cratie had just been sculptured in audacious parody. 

In the midst sat Bake, tattooing with an eastern skill the 
skin of a great lion, that a year before he had killed in single 
combat in the heart of Oran, having watched for the beast 
twelve nights in vain, high perched on a leafy crest of rock, 
above a water-course. While he worked his tongue flew far and 
fast over the camp slang — the slangs of all nations came easy 
to him — in voluble conversation with the Chasseur next, 
who was making a fan out of feathers that any Peeress 
might have signaled with at the Opera. “ Crache-au-nez-d’la- 
Mort ” was in high popularity with his comrades ; and had said 
but the truth when he averred that he had never been so happy 
as under the tricolor. The officers pronounced him an incura- 
bly audacious “ pratique ” ; he was always in mischief, and 
the regimental rules he broke through like a terrier through 
a gauze net; but they knew that when once the trumpets 
sounded Boot and Saddle, this yellow-haired dare-devil of an 
English fellow would be worth a score of more orderly soldiers, 
and that, wherever his adopted flag was carried, there would he 
be, first and foremost, in everything save retreat. The English 
service had failed to turn Rake to account; the French service 
made no such mistake, but knew that though this British bull- 
dog might set his teeth at the leash and the lash, he would 
hold on like grim death in a fight, and live game to the last, if 
well handled. 


276 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


Apart, at the head of the Chambree, sat Cecil. The banter, 
the songs, the laughter, the chorus of tongues, went on un- 
slackened by his presence. He had cordial sympathies with the 
soldiers — with those men who had been his followers in ad- 
versity and danger; and in whom he had found, despite all their 
occasional ferocity and habitual recklessness, traits and 
touches of the noblest instincts of humanity. His heart was 
with them always, as his purse, and his wine, and his bread 
were alike shared ever among them. He had learned to love 
them well — these wild wolf-dogs, whose fangs were so terrible 
to their foes, but whose eyes would still glisten at a kind word, 
and who would give a stanch fidelity unknown to tamer animals. 

Living with them, one of them in all their vicissitudes ; know- 
ing all their vices, but knowing also all their virtues; owing 
to them many an action of generous nobility and watching them 
in many an hour when their gallant self-devotion and their 
loyal friendships went far to redeem their lawless robberies 
and their ruthless crimes, he understood them thoroughly, and 
he could rule them more surely in their tempestuous evil, be- 
cause he comprehended them so well in their mirth and in their 
better moods. When the grade of sous-ofiicier gave him au- 
thority over them, they obeyed him implicitly because they 
knew that his sympathies were with them at all times, and that 
he would be the last to check their gayety, or to punish their 
harmless indiscretions. 

The warlike Roumis had always had a proud tenderness for 
their “ Bel-a-faire-peur,” and a certain wondering respect for 
him; but they would not have adored him to a man, as they 
did, unless they had known that they might laugh without re- 
straint before him, and confide any dilemma to him — sure of 
aid, if aid were in his power. 

The laughter, the work, and the clatter of conflicting tongues 
were at their height; Cecil sat, now listening, now losing him- 
self in thought, while he gave the last touch to the carvings 
before him. They were a set of chessmen which it had taken 
him years to find materials for and to perfect; the white men 
were in ivory, the black in walnut, and were two opposing 
squadrons of French troops and of mounted Arabs. Beautifully 
carved, with every detail of costume rigid to truth, they were 
his masterpiece, though they had only been taken up at any 
odd ten minutes that had happened to be unoccupied during the 
last three or four years. The chessmen had been about with 


THE IVORY SQUADRONS. 


277 

him in so many places and under canvas so long, from the time 
that he chipped out their first Zouave pawn, as he lay in the 
broiling heat of Oran prostrate by a dry brook’s stony channel, 
that he scarcely cared to part with them, and had refused to 
let Rake offer them for sale, with all the rest of the carvings. 
Stooping over them, he did not notice the doors open at the 
end of the Chambree until a sudden silence that fell on the 
babble and uproar round him made him look up; then he rose 
and gave the salute with the rest of his discomfited and awe- 
stricken troopers. Chateauroy with a brilliant party had en- 
tered. 

The Colonel flashed an eagle glance round. 

“ Fine discipline ! You shall go and do this pretty work at 
Beylick ! ” 

The soldiers stood like hounds that see the lash; they knew 
that he was like enough to carry out his threat; though they 
were doing no more than they had always tacit, if not open, 
permission to do. Cecil advanced, and fronted him. 

“ Mine is the blame, mon Commandant ! ” 

He spoke simply, gently, boldly; standing with the ceremony 
that he never forgot to show to their chief, where the glow of 
African sunlight through the casement of the Chambree fell 
full across his face, and his eyes met the dark glance of the 
“ Black Hawk ” unflinchingly. He never heeded that there 
was a gay, varied, numerous group behind Chateauroy; visitors 
who were looking over the barrack; he only heeded that his 
soldiers were unjustly attacked and menaced. 

The Marquis gave a grim, significant smile, that cut like so 
much cord of the scourge. 

“ Ca va sans dire ! Wherever there is insubordination in the 
regiment, the blame is very certain to be yours! Corporal 
Victor, if you allow your Chambree to be turned into the riot 
of a public fair, you will soon find yourself degraded from the 
rank you so signally contrive to disgrace.” 

The words were far less than the tone they were spoken in, 
that gave them all the insolence of so many blows, as he swung 
on his heel and bent to the ladies of the party he escorted. 
Cecil stood mute; bearing the rebuke as it became a Corporal 
to bear his Commander’s anger; a very keen observer might 
have seen that a faint flush rose over the sun tan of his face, 
and that his teeth clinched under his beard ; but he let no other 
sign escape him. 


278 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


The very self-restraint irritated Chateauroy, who would have 
been the first to chastise the presumption of a reply, had any 
been attempted. 

“ Back to your place, sir ! ” he said, with a wave of his hand, 
as he might have waved back a cur. “ Teach your men the first 
formula of obedience, at any rate ! ” 

Cecil fell back in silence. With a swift, warning glance at 
Rake, — whose mouth was working, and whose forehead was hot 
as fire, where he clinched his lion-skin, and longed to be once 
free, to pull his chief down as lions pull in the death spring, — 
he went to his place at the farther end of the chamber and 
stood, keeping his eyes on the chess carvings, lest the control 
which was so bitter to retain should be broken if he looked on 
at the man who had been the curse and the antagonist of his 
whole life in Algeria. 

He saw nothing and heard almost as little of all that went on 
around him; there had been a flutter of cloud-like color in his 
sight, a faint, dreamy fragrance on the air, a sound of mur- 
muring voices and of low laughter; he had known that some 
guests or friends of the Marquis’ had come to view the bar- 
racks, but he never even glanced to see who or what they were. 
The passionate bitterness of just hatred, that he had to choke 
down as though it were the infamous instinct of some name- 
less crime, was on him. 

The moments passed, the hum of the voices floated to his 
ear; the ladies of the party lingered by this soldier and by 
that, buying half the things in the chamber, filling their hands 
with all the quaint trifles, ordering the daggers and the flissas 
and the ornamented saddles and the desert skins to adorn their 
chateaux at home; and raining down on the troopers a shower 
of uncounted Napoleons until the Chasseurs, who had begun 
to think their trades would take them to Beylick, thought in- 
stead that they had drifted into dreams of El Dorado. He 
never looked up; he heard nothing, heeded nothing; he was 
dreamily wondering whether he should always be able so to 
hold his peace, and to withhold his arm, that he should never 
strike his tyrant down with one blow, in which all the oppro- 
brium of years should be stamped out. A voice woke him from 
his reverie. 

“ Are those beautiful carvings yours ? ” 

He looked up, and in the gloom of the alcove where he 
stood, where the sun did not stray, and two great rugs of vari- 


THE IVORY SQUADRONS. 


279 


ous skins, with some conquered banners of Bedouins, hung like 
a black pall, he saw a woman’s eyes resting on him; proud, lus- 
trous eyes, a little haughty, very thoughtful, yet soft withal, 
as the deepest hue of deep waters. He bowed to her with the 
old grace of manner that had so amused and amazed the little 
vivandiere. 

“Yes, madame; they are mine.” 

“ Ah ? — what wonderful skill ! ” 

She took the White King, an Arab Sheik on his charger, in 
her hand, and turned to those about her, speaking of its beau- 
ties and its workmanship in a voice low, very melodious, ever 
so slightly languid, that fell on Cecil’s ear like a chime of long^ 
forgotten music. Twelve years had drifted by since he had 
been in the presence of a high-bred woman, and those linger- 
ing, delicate tones had the note of his dead past. 

He looked at her; at the gleam of the brilliant hair, at the 
arch of the proud brows, at the dreaming, imperial eyes; it was 
a face singularly dazzling, impressive, and beautiful at all 
times ; most so of all in the dusky shadows of the waving desert 
banners, and the rough, rude, barbaric life of the Caserne, 
where a fille de joie or a cantiniere were all of her sex that was 
ever seen, and those — poor wretches ! — w T ere hardened, and 
bronzed, and beaten, and brandy-steeped out of all likeness to 
the fairness of women. 

“You have an exquisite art. They are for sale?” she asked 
him. She spoke with the careless, gracious courtesy of a grande 
dame to a Corporal of Chasseurs ; looking little at him, much at 
the ivory Kings and their mimic hosts of Zouaves and Bedouins. 

“ They are at your service, madame.” 

“ And their price ? ” She had been purchasing largely of the 
men on all sides as she had swept down the length of the 
Chambree, and she drew out some French banknotes as she 
spoke. Never had the bitterness of poverty smitten him as it 
smote him now when this young patrician offered him her gold ! 
Old habits vanquished; he forgot who and where he now was; 
he bowed as in other days he had used to bow in the circle of 
St. James’. 

“ Is — the honor of your acceptance, if you will deign to give 
that.” 

He forgot that he was not as he once had been. He forgot 
that he stood but as a private of the French army before an 
aristocrat whose name he had never heard. 


280 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


She turned and looked at him, which she had never done be- 
fore , so absorbed had she been in the chessmen, and so little did 
a Chasseur of the ranks pass into her thoughts. There was an 
extreme of surprise, there was something of offense, and there 
was still more of coldness in her glance; a proud, languid, as- 
tonished coldness of regard, though it softened slightly as she 
saw that he had spoken in all courtesy of intent. 

She bent her graceful, regal head. 

“ I thank you. Your very clever work can, of course, only be 
mine by purchase.” 

And with that she laid aside the White King among his little 
troop of ivory Arabs and floated onward with her friends. 
Cecil’s face paled slightly under the mellow tint left there by 
the desert sun and the desert wind ; he swept the chessmen into 
their walnut case and thrust them out of sight under his knap- 
sack. Then he stood motionless as a sentinel, with the great 
leopard skins and Bedouin banners behind him, casting a gloom 
that the gold points on his harness could scarcely break in its 
heavy shadow, and never moved till the echo of the voices, and 
the cloud of draperies, and the fragrance of perfumed laces, and 
the brilliancy of the staff officers’ uniforms had passed away, 
and left the soldiers alone in their Chambree. Those careless, 
cold words from a woman’s lips had cut him deeper than the 
matraque could have cut him, though it had bruised his loins 
and lashed his breast ; they showed all he had lost. 

“ What a fool I am still ! ” he thought, as he made his way 
out of the barrack -room. “ I might have fairly forgotten by 
this time that I ever had the rights of a gentleman.” 

So the carvings had won him one warm heart and one keen 
pang that day ; the vivandiere forgave, the aristocrat stung him, 
by means of those snowy, fragile, artistic toys that he had 
shaped in lonely nights under canvas by ruddy picket-fires, be- 
neath the shade of wild fig trees, and in the stir and color of 
Bedouin encampments. 

“ I must ask to be ordered out of the city,” he thought, as 
he pushed his way through the crowds of soldiers and civilians. 
“ Here I get bitter, restless, impatient ; here the past is always 
touching me on the shoulder; here I shall soon grow to regret, 
and to chafe, and to look back like any pining woman. Out yon- 
der there, with no cares to think of but my horse and my troop, I 
am a soldier — and nothing else ; so best. I shall be nothing else as 
long as I live. Pardieu, though ! I don’t know what one wants 



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TIIE IVORY SQUADRONS. 


281 


better; it is a good life, as life goes. One must not turn com- 
pliments to great ladies, that is all — not much of a deprivation 
there. The chessmen are the better for that; her Maltese dog 
would have broken them all the first time it upset their 
table!” 

He laughed a little as he went on smoking his brule-guele; 
the old carelessness, mutability, and indolent philosophies were 
with him still, and were still inclined to thrust away and glide 
from all pain, as it arose. Though much of gravity and of 
thoughtfulness had stolen on him, much of insouciance re- 
mained ; and there were times when there was not a more reck- 
less or a more nonchalant lion in all the battalions than “ Bel- 
a-faire-peur.” Under his gentleness there was “ wild blood ” 
in him still, and the wildness was not tamed by the fiery cham- 
pagne-draught of the perilous, adventurous years he spent. 

“I wonder if I shall never teach the Black Hawk that he 
may strike his beak in once too far ? ” he pondered, with a 
sudden darker, graver touch of musing; and involuntarily he 
stretched his arm out, and looked at the wrist, supple as Da- 
mascus steel, and at the muscles that were traced beneath the 
skin, as he thrust the sleeve up, clear, firm, and sinewy as any 
athlete’s. He doubted his countenance there, fast rein as he 
held all rebellion in, close shield as he bound to him against his 
own passions in the breastplate of a soldier’s first duty — obedi- 
ence. 

He shook the thought off him as he would have shaken a 
snake. It had a terrible temptation — a temptation which he 
knew might any day overmaster him ; and Cecil, who all through 
his life had certain inborn instincts of honor, which served him 
better than most codes or creeds served their professors, was 
resolute to follow the military religion of obedience enjoined 
in the Service that had received him at his needs, and to give 
no precedent in his own person that could be fraught with 
dangerous, rebellious allurement for the untamed, chafing, red- 
hot spirits of his comrades, for whom he knew insubordination 
would be ruin and death — whose one chance of reward, of suc- 
cess, and of a higher ambition lay in their implicit subordina- 
tion to their chiefs, and their continuous resistance of every 
rebellious impulse. 

Cecil had always thought very little of himself. 

In his most brilliant and pampered days he had always con- 
sidered in his own heart that he was a graceless fellow, not 


282 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


worth his salt, and had occasionally wondered, in a listless sort 
of way, why so useless a bagatelle a la mode as his own life was 
had ever been created. He thought much the same now; but 
following his natural instincts, which were always the instincts 
of a gentleman, and of a generous temper, he did, uncon- 
sciously, make his life of much value among its present com- 
rades. 

His influence had done more to humanize the men he was 
associated with than any preachers or teachers could have done. 
The most savage and obscene brute in the ranks with him 
caught something gentler and better from the “ aristocrat.” 
His^ refined habits, his serene temper, his kindly forbearance, 
his high instinctive honor, made themselves felt imperceptibly, 
but surely; they knew that he was as fearless in war, as eager 
for danger as themselves; they knew that he was no saint, but 
loved the smile of women’s eyes, the flush of wines, and the 
excitation of gaming hazards as well as they did ; and hence his 
influence had a weight that probably a more strictly virtuous 
man’s would have strained for and missed forever. The coarsest 
ruffian felt ashamed to make an utter beast of himself before 
the calm eyes of the patrician. The most lawless pratique felt 
a lie halt on his lips when the contemptuous glance of his 
gentleman-comrade taught him that falsehood was poltroonery. 
Blasphemous tongues learned to rein in their filthiness when 
this “ beau lion ” sauntered away from the picket-fire, on an 
icy night, to be out of hearing of their witless obscenities. 
More than once the weight of his arm and the slash of his saber 
had called them to account in fiery fashion for their brutality 
to women or their thefts from the country people, till they grew 
aware that “ Bel-a-faire-peur ” would risk having all their 
swords buried in him rather than stand by to see injustice done. 

And throughout his corps men became unconsciously gentler, 
juster; with a finer sense of right and wrong, and less bestial 
modes of pleasure, of speech, and of habit, because he was 
among them. Moreover, the keen-eyed desperadoes who made- 
up the chief sum of his comrades saw that he gave unquestion- 
ing respect to a chief who made his life a hell; and rendered 
unquestioning submission under affronts, tyrannies, and in- 
sults which, as they also saw, stung him to the quick, and tor- 
tured him as no physical torture would have done — and the 
sjght was not without a strong effect for good on them. They 
could tell that he suffered under these as they never suffered 


THE IVORY SQUADRONS. 283 

themselves, yet he bore them and did his duty with a self-control 
and patience they had never attained. 

Almost insensibly they grew ashamed to be beaten by him, 
and strove to grow like him as far as they could. They never 
knew him drunk, they never heard him swear, they never found 
him unjust — even to a poverty-striken indigene; or brutal — 
even to a fille de joie. Insensibly his presence humanized them. 
Of a surety, the last part Bertie dreamed of playing was that 
of a teacher to any mortal thing; yet, here in Africa, it might 
reasonably be questioned if a second Augustine or Francis 
Xavier would ever have done half the good among the devil- 
may-care Roumis that was wrought by the dauntless, listless, 
reckless soldier who followed instinctively the one religion 
which has no cant in its brave, simple creed, and binds man 
to man in links that are true as steel — the religion of a gallant 
gentleman’s loyalty and honor. 


CHAPTER XX. 


CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE. 

“ Corporal Victor, M. le Commandant desires you to present 
yourself at his campagne to-night, at ten precisely, with all 
your carvings; above all, with the chessmen.” 

The swift, sharp voice of a young officer of his regiment 
wakened Cecil from his musing, as he went on his way down 
the crowded, tortuous, stifling street. He had scarcely time to 
catch the sense of the words, and to halt, giving the salute, 
before the Chasseur’s skittish little Barbary mare had galloped 
past him; scattering the people right and left, knocking over a 
sweetmeat seller, upsetting a string of maize-laden mules, jos- 
tling a venerable marabout on to an impudent little grisette, 
and laming an old Moor as he tottered to his mosque, without 
any apology for any of the mischief, in the customary inso- 
lence which makes “ Roumis ” and “ Bureaucratie ” alike ex- 
ecrated by the indigenous populace with a detestation that the 
questionable benefits of civilized importations can do very little 
to counter-balance in the fiery breasts of the sons of the soil. 

Cecil involuntarily stood still. His face darkened. All or- 
ders that touched on the service, even where harshest and most 
unwelcome, he had taught himself to take without any hesita- 
tion, till he now scarcely felt the check of the steel curb; but 
to be ordered thus like a lackey — to take his wares thus like a 
hawker ! 

“Ah, ma cantche! We are soldiers, not traders — aren’t we? 
You don’t like that, M. Victor? You are no peddler — eh? 
And you think you would rather risk being court-martialed 
and shot than take your ivory toys for the Black Hawk’s 
talons ? ” 

Cecil glanced up in astonishment at the divination and 
translation of his thoughts, to encounter the bright, falcon eyes 
of Cigarette looking down on him from a little oval casement 
above, dark as pitch within, and whose embrasure, with its rim 
of gray stone coping, set off like a picture-frame, with a heavy 
background of unglazed Rembrandt shadow, the piquant head 


CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE. 285 


of the Friend of the Flag; with her pouting, scarlet, mocking 
lips, and her mischievous, challenging smile, and her dainty 
little gold-banded foraging-cap set on curls as silken and jetty 
as any black Irish setter’s. 

“Bon jour, ma belle!” he answered, with a little weariness; 
lifting his fez to her with a certain sense of annoyance that 
this young bohemian of the barracks, this child with her slang 
and her satire, should always be in his way like a shadow. 

“ Bon jour, mon brave! ” returned Cigarette contemptuously. 
“We are not so ceremonious as all that in Algiers! Good fel- 
low, you should be a chamberlain, not a corporal. What fine 
manners, mon Dieu ! ” 

She w T as incensed, piqued, and provoked. She had been ready 
to forgive him because he carved so wonderfully, and sold the 
carvings for his comrade at the hospital; she was holding out 
the olive-branch after her own petulant fashion ; and she 
thought, if he had had any grace in him, he would have re- 
sponded with some such florid compliment as those for which 
she was accustomed to box the ears of her admirers, and would 
have swung himself up to the coping, to touch, or at least try 
to touch, those sweet, fresh, crimson lips of hers, that were like 
a half-opened damask rose. Modesty is apt to go to the wall 
in camps, and poor little Cigarette’s notions of the great pas- 
sion were very simple, rudimentary, and, certes, in no way coy. 
How should they be ? She had tossed about with the army, like 
one of the tassels to their standards; blowing whichever way 
the breath of war floated her; and had experienced, or thought 
she had experienced, as many affaires as the veriest Don Juan 
among them, though her heart had never been much concerned 
in them, but had beaten scarce a shade quicker, if a lunge in 
a duel, or a shot from an Indigene, had pounced off with her 
hero of the hour to Hades. 

“ Fine manners ! ” echoed Cecil, with a smile. “ My poor 
child, have you been so buffeted about that you have never been 
treated with commonest courtesy ? ” 

“ Whew ! ” cried the little lady, blowing a puff of smoke down 
on him. “ None of your pity for me, my ci-devant ! Buffeted 
about? Nom du diable! do you suppose anybody ever did any- 
thing with me that I didn’t choose ? If you had as much power 
as I have in the army, Chateauroy would not send for you to 
sell your toys like a peddler. You are a slave! I am a sover- 
eign ! ” 


286 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


With which she tossed back her graceful, spirited head, as 
though the gold band of her cap were the gold band of a diadem. 
She was very proud of her station in the Army of Africa, and 
glorified her privileges with all a child’s vanity. 

He listened, amused with her boastful supremacy; but the 
last words touched him with a certain pang just in that mo- 
ment. He felt like a slave — a slave who must obey his tyrant, 
or go out and die like a dog. 

“Well, yes,” he said slowly; “I am a slave, I fear. I wish 
a Bedouin flissa would cut my thralls in two.” 

He spoke jestingly, but there was a tinge of sadness in the 
words that touched Cigarette’s changeful temper to contrition, 
and filled her with the same compassion and wonder at him that 
she had felt when the ivory wreaths and crucifixes had lain 
in her hands. She knew she had been ungenerous — a crime 
dark as night in the sight of the little chivalrous soldier. 

“Tiens!” she said softly and waywardly, winding her way 
aright with that penetration and tact which, however unsexed 
in other things, Cigarette had kept thoroughly feminine. 
“ That was but an idle word of mine ; forgive it, and forget it. 
You are not a slave when you fight in the fantasias. Morbleu ! 
they say to see you kill a man is beautiful — so workmanlike! 
And you would go out and be shot to-morrow, rather than sell 
your honor, or stain it — eh ? Bah ! while you know they should 
cut your heart out rather than make you tell a, lie, or betray 
a comrade, you are no slave, my galonne; you have the best 
freedom of all. Take a glass of champagne? Prut-tut! how 
you look! Oh, the demoiselles, with the silver necks, are not 
barrack drink, of course; but I drink champagne always myself. 
This is M. le Prince’s. He knows I only take the best brands.” 

With which Cigarette, leaning down from her casement, 
whose sill was about a foot above his head, tendered her peace- 
offering in a bottle of Cliquot; three of which, packed in her 
knapsack, she had carried off from the luncheon-table of a Rus- 
sian Prince who was touring through Algiers, and who had 
half lost his Grand Ducal head after the bewitching, dauntless, 
capricious, unattachable, unpurchasable, and coquettish little 
fire-eater of the Spahis, who treated him with infinitely more 
insolence and indifference than she would show to some bat- 
tered old veteran, or some worn-out old dog, who had passed 
through the great Kabaila raids and battles. 

“You will go to your Colonel’s to-night?” she said ques- 



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CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE. 287 


tioningly, as he drank the champagne, and thanked her — for 
he saw the spirit in which the gift was tendered — as he leaned 
against the half-ruined Moorish wall, with its blue-and-white 
striped awning spread over both their heads in the little street 
whose crowds, chatter, thousand eyes, and incessant traffic no 
way troubled Cigarette; who had talked argot to monarchs un- 
daunted, and who had been one of the chief sights in a hundred 
grand reviews ever since she had been perched on a gun-carriage 
at five years old, and paraded with a troop of horse artillery 
in the Champ de Mars, as having gone through the whole of 
Bugeaud’s campaign, at which parade, by the way, being ten- 
dered sweetmeats by a famous General’s wife. Cigarette had 
made the immortal reply, in lisping sabir : “ Madame, mes bon- 
bons sont des boulets ! ” * 

She repeated her question imperiously, as Cecil kept silent: 
“ You will go to-night? ” 

He shrugged his shoulders. He did not care to discuss his 
Colonel’s orders with this pretty little Bacchante. 

“ Oh, a chief’s command, you know ” 

“ A fico for a chief ! ” retorted Cigarette impatiently. 
“Why don’t you say the truth? You are thinking you will 
disobey, and risk the rest ! ” 

“Well, why not? I grant his right in barrack and field, 
but ” 

He spoke rather to himself than her, and his thoughts, as 
he spoke, went back to the scene of the morning. He felt, 
with a romantic impulse that he smiled at, even as it passed over 
him, that he would rather have half a dozen muskets fired at 
him in the death-sentence of a mutineer than meet again the 
glance of those proud, azure eyes, sweeping over him in their 
calm indifference to a private of Chasseurs, their calm igno- 
rance that he could be wounded or be stung. 

“ But ? ” echoed Cigarette, leaning out of her oval hole, 
perched in the quaint, gray Moresco wall, parti-colored with 
broken encaustics of varied hues. “ Chut, bon camerade ! that 
little word has been the undoing of the world ever since the 
world began. ‘ But ’ is a blank cartridge, and never did any- 
thing but miss fire yet. Shoot dead, or don’t aim at all, which- 
ever you like ; but never make a coup manque f with ‘ but ’ ! 
So you won’t obey Chateauroy in this ? ” 


* “ Madame, my sweetmeats are bullets ! 


t False stroke. 


288 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


He was silent again. He would not answer falsely, and he 
did not care to say his thoughts to her. 

“ ‘ No/ ” pursued Cigarette, translating his silence at her 
fancy, “ you say to yourself, ‘ I am an aristocrat — I will not 
be ordered in this thing ’ — you say, ‘ I am a good soldier ; I will 
not be sent for like a hawker ’ — you say, ‘ I was noble once : I 
will show my blood at last, if I die ! ’ Ah ! — you say that ! ” 

He laughed a little as he looked up at her. 

“Not exactly that, but something as foolish, perhaps. Are 
you a witch, my pretty one ? ” 

“ Whoever doubted it, except you ? ” 

She looked one, in truth, whom few men could resist, bend- 
ing to him out of her owl’s nest, with the flash of the sun under 
the blue awning brightly catching the sunny brown of her soft 
cheek and the cherry bloom of her lips, arched, pouting, and 
coquette. She set her teeth sharply, and muttered a hot, heavy 
sacre, or even something worse, as she saw that his eyes had 
not even remained on her, but were thoughtfully looking down 
the checkered light and color of the street. She was passionate, 
she was vain, she was wayward, she was fierce as a little velvet 
leopard, as a handsome, brilliant plumaged hawk; she had all 
the faults, as she had all the virtues, of the thorough Celtic 
race; and, for the moment, she had an instinct — fiery, ruthless, 
and full of hate — to draw the pistol out of her belt, and teach 
him with a shot, crash through heart or brain, that girls who 
were “ unsexed ” could keep enough of the woman in them not 
to be neglected with impunity, and could lose enough of it to 
be able to avenge the negligence by a summary vendetta. But 
she was a haughty little condottiere, in her fashion. She would 
not ask for what was not offered her, nor give a rebuke that 
might be traced to mortification. She only set her two rosebud- 
lips in as firm a line of wrath and scorn as ever Caesar’s or 
Napoleon’s molded themselves into, and spoke in the curt, im- 
perious, generalissimo fashion with which Cigarette before now 
had rallied a demoralized troop, reeling drunk and mad away 
from a razzia. 

“I am a witch! That is, I can put two and two together, 
and read men, though I don’t read the alphabet. Well, one read* 
ing is a good deal rarer than the other. So you mean to dis- 
obey the Hawk to-night? I like you for that. But listen here 
— did you ever hear them talk of Marquise ? ” 

“ No!” 


CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE. 289 


“ Parbleu ! ” swore the vivandiere in her wrath, “ you look on 
at a bamboula as if it were only a bear-cub dancing, and can 
only give one ‘ yes ’ and ‘ no,’ as if one were a drummer-boy. 
Bah ! are fhose your Paris courtesies ? ” 

“Forgive me, ma belle! I thought you called yourself our 
comrade, and would have no i fine manners.’ There is no know- 
ing how to please you.” 

He might have pleased her simply and easily enough, if he 
had only looked up with a shade of interest to that most pic- 
turesque picture, bright as a pastel portrait, that was hung 
above him in the old tumble-down Moorish stonework. But his 
thoughts were with other things; and a love scene with this 
fantastic young Amazon did not attract him. The warm, ripe, 
mellow little wayside cherry hung directly in his path, with 
the sun on its bloom, and the free wind tossing it merrily; but 
it had no charm for him. He was musing rather on that costly, 
delicate, brilliant-hued, hothouse blossom that could only be 
reached down by some rich man’s hand, and grew afar on 
heights where never winter chills, nor summer tan, could come 
too rudely on it. 

“ Come, tell me what is Marquise ? — a kitten ? ” he went on, 
leaning his arm still on the sill of her embrasure, and willing 
to coax her out of her anger. 

“A kitten!” echoed Cigarette contemptuously. “You think 
me a child, I suppose ? ” 

“ Surely you are not far off it ? ” 

“ Mon Dieu ! why, I was never a child in my life,” retorted 
Cigarette, waxing sunny-tempered and confidential again, while 
she perched herself, like some gay-feathered mocking-bird on 
a branch, on the window-sill itself. “ When I was two, I used 
to be beaten like a Turco that pawns his musket; when I was 
three, I used to scrape up the cigar ends the officers dropped 
about, to sell them again for a bit of black bread; when I was 
four, I knew all about Philippe Durron’s escape from Beylick, 
and bit my tongue through, to say nothing, when my mother 
flogged me with a tringlo’s mule-whip, because I would not tell, 
that she might tell again at the Bureau and get the reward. 
A child? — diantre! before I was two feet high I had winged 
my first Arbi. He stole a rabbit I was roasting. Presto! how 
quick he dropped it when my ball broke his wrist like a 
twig ! ” 

And the Friend of the Flag laughed gayly at the recollection, 


290 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


as at the best piece of mirth with which memory could furnish 
her. 

“But you asked about Marquise? Well, he was what you 
are — a hawk among carrion crows, a gentleman in the ranks. 
Dieu! how handsome he was! Nobody ever knew his real name, 
but they thought he was of Austrian breed, and we called him 
Marquise because he was so womanish white in his skin and 
dainty in all his ways. Just like you! Marquise could fight, 
fight like a hundred devils; and — pouf! — how proud he was — 
very much like you altogether! Now, one day something went 
wrong in the exercise ground. Marquise was not to blame, but 
they thought he was; and an adjutant struck him — flick, flack, 
like that — across the face with a riding switch. Marquise had 
his bayonet fixed — he belonged to the Turcos — and before we 
knew what was up, crash the blade went through — through the 
breast-bone, and out at the spine — and the adjutant fell as dead 
as a cat, with the blood spouting out like a fountain. ‘ I come 
of a great race, that never took insult without giving back 
death,’ was all that Marquise said when they seized him and 
brought him to judgment; and he would never say of what race 
that was. They shot him — ah, bah! discipline must be kept — 
and I saw him with five great wounds in his chest, and his 
beautiful golden hair all soiled with the sand and the powder, 
lying there by the open grave, that they threw him into as if 
he were offal; and we never knew more of him than that.” 

Cigarette’s radiant laugh had died, and her careless voice 
had sunk, over the latter words. As the little vivacious bru- 
nette told the tale of a nameless life, it took its eloquence from 
her, simple and brief as her speech was; and it owned a deeper 
pathos because the reckless young Bacchante of the As de 
Pique grew grave one moment while she told it. Then, grave 
still, she leaned her brown, bright face nearer down from her 
oval hole in the wall. 

“ Now,” she whispered very low, “ if you mutiny once, they 
will shoot you just like Marquise, and you will die just as silent, 
like him.” 

“Well,” he answered her slowly, “why not? Death is no 
great terror; I risk it every day for the sake of a common 
soldier’s rations; why should I not chance it for the sake and 
in the defense of my honor ? ” 

“Bah! men sell their honor for their daily bread all the 
world over!” said Cigarette, with the satire that had treble 


CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE. 291 


raciness from the slang in which she clothed it. “ But it is not 
you alone. See here — one example set on your part, and half 
your regiment will mutiny too. It is bitter work to obey the 
Black Hawk, and if you give the signal of revolt, three parts 
of your comrades will join you. Now what will that end in, 
beau lion — eh ? ” 

“ Tell me — you are a soldier yourself, you say.” 

“ Yes, I am a soldier! ” said Cigarette between her tight-set 
teeth, while her eyes brightened, and her voice sank down into 
a whisper that had a certain terrible meaning in it, like the 
first dropping of the scattered, opening shots in the distance 
before a great battle commences ; “ and I have seen war, not 
holiday war, but war in earnest — war when men fall like hail- 
stones, and tear like tigers, and choke like mad dogs with their 
throats full of blood and sand; when the gun-carriage wheels 
go crash over the writhing limbs, and the horses charge full 
gallop over the living faces, and the hoofs beat out the brains 
before death has stunned them senseless. Oh, yes! I am a 
soldier, and I will tell you one thing I have seen. I have seen 
soldiers mutiny, a squadron of them, because they hated their 
chief and loved two of their sous-officiers ; and I have seen the 
end of it all — a few hundred men, blind and drunk with 
despair, at bay against as many thousands, and walled in with 
four lines of steel and artillery, and fired on from a score of 
cannon-mouths — volley on volley, like the thunder — till not one 
living man was left, and there was only a shapeless, heaving, 
moaning mass, with the black smoke over all. That is what I 
have seen ; you will not make me see it again ? ” 

Her face was very earnest, very eloquent, very dark, and 
tender with thought ; there was a vein of grave, even of intense 
feeling, that ran through the significant words to which tone 
and accent lent far more meaning than lay in their mere 
phrases ; the little bohemian lost her insolence when she pleaded 
for her “ children,” her comrades ; and the mischievous pet of 
the camp never treated lightly what touched the France that 
she loved — the France that, alone of all things in her careless 
life, she held in honor and reverence. 

“You will not make me see it again?” she said, once more 
leaning out, with her eyes, that were like a brown brook 
sparkling deep, yet bright in the sun, fixed on him. “ They 
would rise at your bidding, and they would be mowed down like 
corn. You will not? ” 


292 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ Never ! I give you my word.” 

The promise was from his heart. He would have endured 
any indignity, any outrage, rather than have drawn into ruin, 
through him, the fiery, fearless, untutored lives of the men 
who marched, and slept, and rode, and fought, and lay in the 
light of the picket-fires, and swept down through the hot sand- 
storms on to the desert foe by his side. Cigarette stretched 
out her hand to him — that tiny brown hand, which, small though 
it was, had looked so burned and so hard beside the delicate, 
fairy ivory carvings of his workmanship — stretched it out with 
a frank, winning, childlike, soldierlike grace. 

“ C’est ga, tu es bon soldat ! ” * 

He bent over the hand she held to his in the courtesy natural 
with him to all her sex, and touched it lightly with his lips. 

“ Thank you, my little comrade,” he said simply, with the 
graver thought still on him that her relation and her entreaty 
had evoked; “you have given me a lesson that I shall not be 
quick to forget.” 

Cigarette was the wildest little bacchanal that ever pirouetted 
for the delight of half a score of soldiers in their shirt-sleeves 
and half-drunk; she was the most reckless coquette that ever 
made the roll-call of her lovers range from prince-marshals to 
plowbov conscripts; she had flirted as far and wide as the but- 
terfly flirts with the blossoms it flutters on to through the range 
of a summer day; she took kisses, if the giver of them were 
handsome, as readily as a child takes sweetmeats at Mardi Gras ; 
and of feminine honor, feminine scruples, feminine delicacy, 
knew nothing save by such very dim, fragmentary instincts as 
nature still planted in scant growth amid the rank soil and the 
pestilent atmosphere of camp-life. Her eyes had never sunk, 
her face had never flushed, her heart had never panted for the 
boldest or the wildest wooer of them all, from M. le Due’s 
Lauzun-esque blandishments to Pouffer-de-Rire’s or Miou- 
Miou’s rough overtures ; she had the coquetry of her nation with 
the audacity of a boy. Now only, for the first time, Cigarette 
colored hotly at the grave, graceful, distant salute, so cold and 
so courteous, which was offered her in lieu of the rude and 
boisterous familiarities to which she was accustomed ; and drew 
her hand away with what was, to the shame of her soldierly 
hardihood and her barrack tutelage, very nearly akin to an 
impulse of shyness. 

* “ That’8 right ! You are a true soldier ! ” 



Photo by Byron 





CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE. 


293 


“ Dame ! Ne me donnez de la gabatine ! * I am not a court 
lady, bon zig ! ” she cried hastily, almost petulantly, to cover 
the unwonted and unwelcome weakness; while, to make good 
the declaration and revindicate her military renown, she bal- 
anced herself lightly on the stone ledge of her oval hole, and 
sprang, with a young wildcat’s easy, vaulting leap, over his head, 
and over the heads of the people beneath, on to the ledge of 
the house opposite, a low-built wine-shop, whose upper story 
nearly touched the leaning walls of the old Moorish buildings 
in which she had been perched. The crowd in the street below 
looked up, amazed and aghast, at that bound from casement to 
casement as she flew over their heads like a blue-and-scarlet- 
winged bird of Oran ; but they laughed as they saw who it was. 

“ It is Cigarette ! ” growled a Turco Indigene. “ Ah, ha ! the 
devil, for a certainty, must have been her father ! ” 

“ To be sure!” cried the Friend of the Flag, looking from 
her elevation ; “ he is a very good father, too, and I don’t tease 
him like his sons the priests ! But I have told him to take you, 
Ben Arsli, the next time you are stripping a dead body; so 
look out — he won’t have to wait long.” 

The discomfited Indigene hustled his way, with many an 
oath, through the laughing crowd as best he might; and Ciga- 
rette, with an airy pirouette on the wine-shop’s roof that would 
have done honor to any opera boards, and was executed as care- 
lessly, twenty feet above earth, as if she had been a pantomime- 
dancer all her days, let herself down by the awning, hand over 
hand, like a little mousse from the harbor, jumped on to a 
forage wagon that was just passing full trot down the street, 
and disappeared; standing on the piles of hay, and singing to 
the driving tringlos’ unutterable delight the stanzas of Be- 
ranger’s “ Infidelites de Lisette ” ; her lithe, slender, miniature 
form, with its flash of gold on the breast, and its strip of rich 
scarlet in the fluttering sash, rising out against the blue and 
burning sky, the glare of the white walls, and the dusky glow 
and movement of the ebbing and flowing crowd. 

Cecil looked after her, with a certain touch of pity for her 
in him. 

“ What a gallant boy is spoiled in that little Amazon ! ” he 
thought; the quick flush of her face, the quick withdrawal of 
her hand, he had not noticed; she had not much interest for 
him, — scarcely any, indeed, — save that he saw she was pretty, 
* ‘ ‘ Stuff ! Don’t humbug me ! ” 


294 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


with a mignonne, mischievous face, that all the sun-tan of 
Africa and all the wild life of the Caserne could not harden 
or debase. But he was sopy a child so bright and so brave 
should be turned into three parts a trooper as she was, should 
have been tossed up on the ^scum and filth of the lowest barrack 
life, and should be doomed in a few years’ time to become the 
yellow, battered, foul-mouthed, vulture-eyed camp-follower that 
premature old age would surely render the darling of the tri- 
color, the pythoness of the As de Pique. 

Cigarette was making scorn of her doom of Sex, dancing it 
down, drinking it down, laughing it down, burning it out in 
tobacco fumes, drowning it in trembling cascades of wine, 
trampling it to dust under the cancan by her little brass-bound 
boots, mocking it away with her slang jests, and her Theresa 
songs, and her devil-may-care audacities, till there was scarce 
a trace of it left in this prettiest and wildest little scamp of 
all the Army of Africa. But strive to kill it how she would, 
her sex would have its revenge one day and play Nemesis to 
her. 

She was bewitching now — bewitching, though she had no 
witchery for him — in her youth. But when the bloom should 
leave her brown cheeks, and the laughter die out of her light- 
ning glance, the womanhood she had defied would assert itself, 
and avenge itself, and be hideous in the sight of the men who 
now loved the tinkling of those little spurred feet, and shouted 
with applause to hear the reckless barrack blasphemies ring 
their mirth from that fresh mouth which was now like a bud 
from a damask rose branch, though even now it steeped itself 
in wine, and sullied itself with oaths, and seared itself with 
smoke, and had never been touched from its infancy with any 
kiss that was innocent — not even with its mother’s. 

And there was a deep tinge of pity for her in Cecil’s thoughts 
as he watched her out of sight, and then strolled across to the 
cafe opposite to finish his eigar beneath its orange-striped awn- 
ing. The child had been flung upward, a little straw floating 
in the gutter of Paris iniquities; a little foam-bell bubbling 
on the sewer waters of barrack-vice; the stick had been her 
teacher, the baggage-wagon her cradle, the camp-dogs her play- 
fellows, the caserne * oaths her lullaby, the guidons f her sole 
guiding stars, the razzia X her sole fete day ; it was little marvel 
that the bright, bold, insolent little Friend of the Flag had 
* Barrack. t Standards. $ Raid. 


CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE. 


295 


nothing left of her sex save a kitten’s mischief and a coquette’s 
archness. It said much rather for the straight, fair, sunlit in- 
stincts of the untaught nature that Cigarette had gleaned, even 
out of such a life, two virtues that she would have held by to 
the death, if tried: a truthfulness that would have scorned a 
lie as only fit for cowards, and a loyalty that cleaved to France 
as a religion. 

Cecil thought that a gallant boy was spoiled in this eighteen- 
year-old brunette of a campaigner ; he might have gone further 
and said that a hero was lost. 

“ Voila! ” said Cigarette between her little teeth. 

She stood in the glittering Algerine night, brilliant with 
a million stars, and balmy with a million flowers, before the 
bronze trellised gate of the villa on the Sahel, where Chateau- 
roy, when he was not on active service — which chanced rarely, 
for he was one of the finest soldiers and most daring chiefs in 
Africa — indemnified himself, with the magnificence that his pri- 
vate fortune enabled him to enjoy, for the unsparing exertions 
and the rugged privations that he always shared willingly with 
the lowest of his soldiers. It was the grandest trait in the man’s 
character that he utterly scorned the effeminacy with which 
many commanders provided for their table, their comfort, and 
their gratification while campaigning, and would commonly 
neither take himself nor allow to his officers any more indul- 
gence on the march than his troopers themselves enjoyed. But 
his villa on the Sahel was a miniature palace; it had formerly 
been the harem of a great Rais, and the gardens were as en- 
chanting as the interior was — if something florid, still as ele- 
gant as Paris art and Paris luxury could make it; for ferocious 
as the Black Hawk was in war, and well as he loved the chase 
and the slaughter, he did not disdain, when he had whetted 
beak and talons to satiety, to smooth his ruffled plumage in 
downy nests and under caressing hands. 

To-night the windows of the pretty, low, snow-white, far- 
stretching building were lighted and open, and through the 
wilderness of cactus, myrtle, orange, citron, fuchsia, and a 
thousand flowers that almost buried it under their weight of 
leaf and blossom, a myriad of lamps were gleaming like so 
many glowworms beneath the foliage, while from a cedar grove, 
some slight way farther out, the melodies and overtures of the 
best military bands in Algiers came mellowed, though not 
broken, by the distance and the fall of the bubbling fountains. 


296 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


Cigarette looked and listened, and her gay, brown face grew 
duskily warm with wrath. 

“ Ah, bah ! ” she muttered as she pressed her pretty lips to 
the lattice- work. “ The men die like murrained sheep in the 
hospital, and get sour bread tossed to them as if they were 
pigs, and are thrashed if they pawn their muskets for a stoup 
of drink when their throats are as dry as the desert — and you 
live like a coq en pate ! * Morbleu ! what fools the people are 
to fight, and toil, and get their limbs broken, and have their 
brains dashed out by spent balls, that M. le Marechal may send 
home a grand story with his own name flaring in letters a yard 
long on the placards, and M. le Colonel give his fetes with 
stars and ribbons on his breast, while those who won the battle 
lie rotting in the sand ! ” 

Cigarette was a resolute little democrat; she had loaded the 
carbines behind the barricade in an emeute in Paris before she 
was ten years old, and was not seldom in the perplexity of con- 
flicting creeds when her loyalty to the tricolor and the guidons 
smote with a violent clash on her love for the populace and their 
liberty. She was given, however, usually to reconciling the 
dilemma with all her sex’s illogical ingenuity, and so far thor- 
oughly carried out her republicanism that she boxed a Prince’s 
ear without ceremony when one tried to subjugate her, and 
never by any chance veiled the sun of her smiles to her “ chil- 
dren ” the troopers — not even when she was tired to death after 
a burning march across leagues on leagues of locust-wasted 
country, or had spent half the night, after a skirmish, dressing 
wounds, soothing fever, seeking out the dying men who lay 
scattered on the outskirts of the field of carnage, with a magic, 
and a sweetness, and a patience that seemed rather fitting for 
the gentle Soeurs Grises than for the wayward, mischievous, 
insolent young reveler of the As de Pique. 

She looked a moment longer through the gilded scroll-work; 
then, as she had done once before, thrust her pistols well within 
her sash that they should not catch upon the boughs, and push- 
ing herself through the prickly cactus hedge, impervious to any- 
thing save herself or a Barbary marmoset, twisted with marvel- 
ous ingenuity through the sharp-pointed leaves, and the close 
barriers of spines, and launched herself with inimitable dex- 
terity on to the other side of the cacti. Cigarette had too often 
played a game at spying and reconnoitering for her regiments, 

* In clover. 


CIGARETTE EN C0N8EIL ET CACHETTE. 297 

and played it with a cleverness that distanced even the most 
ruse of the Zephyrs, not to be able to do just whatever she 
chose, in taking the way she liked, and lurking unseen at dis- 
cretion. 

She crossed the breadth of the grounds under the heavy shade 
of arbutus trees with a hare’s fleetness, and stood a second look- 
ing at the open windows and the terraces that lay before them, 
brightly lighted by the summer moon and by the lamps that 
sparkled among the shrubs. Then down she dropped, as quickly, 
as. lightly, as a young setter down charging among the ferns, 
into a shower of rhododendrons, whose rose and lilac blossoms 
shut her wholly within them, like a fairy inclosed in bloom. 
The good fairy of one life there she was assuredly, though she 
might be but a devil-may-care, audacious, careless little femi- 
nine Belphegor and military Asmodeus. 

“ Ah ! ” she said, quickly and sharply, with a deep-drawn 
breath. The single ejaculation was at once a menace, a tender- 
ness, a whirlwind of rage, a volume of disdain, a world of pity. 
It was intensely French, and the whole nature of Cigarette 
was in it. 

Yet all she saw was a small and brilliant group sauntering 
to and fro before the open windows, after dinner, listening J p 
the bands, which, through dinner, had played to them, and 
laughing low and softly; and, at some distance from them, be- 
neath the shade of a cedar, the figure of a Corporal of Chas- 
seurs, — calm, erect, motionless, — as though he were the figure of 
a soldier cast in bronze. The scene was simple enough, though 
very picturesque; but it told, by its vivid force of contrast, a 
whole history to Cigarette. 

“ A true soldier ! ” she muttered, where she lay among the 
rhododendrons, while her eyes grew very soft, as she gave the 
highest word of praise that her whole range of language held. 
“ A true soldier ! How he keeps his promise ! But it must be 
bitter ! ” 

She looked a while, very wistfully, at the Chasseur, where he 
stood under the Lebanon boughs; then her glance swept bright 
as a hawk’s over the terrace, and lighted with a prescient hatred 
on the central form of all — a woman’s. There were two other 
great ladies there; but she passed them, and darted with unerr- 
ing instinct on that proud, fair, patrician head, with its 
haughty, stag-like carriage and the crown of its golden 
hair. 


298 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


Cigarette had seen grandes dames by the thousand, though 
never very close; seen them in Paris, when they came to look 
on at a grand review; seen them in their court attire, when the 
Guides had filled the Carrousel on some palace ball-night, and 
lined the Cour des Princes, and she had bewitched the officers 
of the guard into letting her pass in to see the pageantry. But 
she had never felt for those grandes dames anything save a 
considerably contemptuous indifference. She had looked on 
them pretty much as a war-worn, powder-tried veteran looks 
on the curled dandy of some fashionable, home-staying corps. 
She had never realized the difference betwixt them and herself, 
save in so far as she thought them useless butterflies, worth 
nothing at all, and laughed as she triumphantly remembered 
how she could shoot a man like any Tirailleur^ and break in 
a colt like any roughrider. 

Now, for the first time, the sight of one of those aristocrats 
smote her with a keen, hot sting of heart-burning jealousy. 
Now, for the first time, the little Friend of the Flag looked at 
all the nameless graces of rank with an envy that her sunny, 
gladsome, generous nature had never before been touched with 
— with a sudden perception, quick as thought, bitter as gall, 
wounding, and swift, and poignant, of what this womanhood, 
that he had said she herself had lost, might be in its highest 
and purest shape. 

“ Unsexed — he said I was unsexed,” she mused, while her 
teeth clinched on the ruby fullness of her lips, and her heart 
swelled, half with impotent rage, half with unconfessed pain. 
For the first time, looking on this imperial foreign beauty, 
sweeping so slowly and so idly along there in the Algerian star- 
light, she understood all that he had missed, all that he had 
meant, when he had used that single word, for which she had 
vowed on him her vengeance and the vengeance of the Army of 
Africa. 

“ If those are the women that he knew before he came here, 
I do not wonder that he never cared to watch even my bam- 
boula,” was the latent, unacknowledged thought that was so 
cruel to her: the consciousness — which forced itself in on her, 
while her eyes jealously followed the perfect grace of the one 
in whom instinct had found her rival — that, while she had 
been so proud of her recklessness, and her devilry and her 
trooper’s slang, and her deadly skill as a shot, she had only been 
something very worthless, something very lightly held by those 


CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE. 299 

who liked her for a ribald jest, and a guinguette dance, and a 
Spahis’ supper of headlong riot and drunken mirth. 

The mood did riot last. She was too brave, too fiery, too 
dauntless, too untamed. The dusky, angry flush upon her face 
grew deeper, and the passion gathered more stormily in her 
eyes, while she felt the pistol butts in her sash, and laughed 
low to herself, where she lay stretched under her flowery nest. 

“ Bah ! she would faint, I dare say, at the mere sight of 
these,” she thought, with her old disdain, “ and would stand 
fire no more than a gazelle! They are only made for summer- 
day weather, those dainty, gorgeous, silver pheasants. A breath 
of war, a touch of tempest, would soon beat them down — crash ! 
— with all their proud crests drooping ! ” 

Like many another 'Cigarette underrated what she had no 
knowledge of, and depreciated an antagonist the measure of 
whose fence she had no power to gauge. 

Crouched there among the rhododendrons, she lay as still 
as a mouse, moving nearer and nearer, though none would have 
told that so much as a lizard even stirred under the blossoms, 
until her ear, quick and unerring as an Indian’s, could detect 
the sense of the words spoken by that group, which so aroused 
all the hot ire of her warrior’s soul and her democrat’s impa- 
tience. Chateauroy himself was bending his fine, dark head 
toward the patrician on whom her instinct of sex had fastened 
her hatred. 

“ You expressed your wish to see my Corporal’s little 
sculptures again, madame,” he was murmuring now, as Ciga- 
rette got close enough under her flower shadows to catch the 
sense of the words. “To hear was to obey with me. He waits 
your commands yonder.” 

“ Mille tonneres ! It was you, was it, brought him here ? ” 
muttered the Friend of the Flag to herself, with the passion 
in her burning more hotly against that “ silver pheasant,” whose 
delicate train was sweeping the white marbles of Chateauroy’s 
terraces, and whose reply, “ with fashion, not with feeling, 
softly freighted,” she lost, though she could guess what it had 
been, when a lackey crossed the lawn, and summoned the Chas- 
seur from his waiting-place beneath the cedars. 

Cecil obeyed, passed up the terrace stairs, and stood before 
his Colonel, giving the salute; the shade of some acacias still 
fell across him, while the party he fronted were in all the glow 
of a full Algerian moon and of the thousand lamps among the 


300 


UNDEK TWO FLAGS. 


belt of flowers and trees. Cigarette gave another sharp, deep- 
drawn breath, and lay as mute and motionless as she had done 
before then, among the rushes of some dried brook’s bed, scan- 
ning a hostile camp, when the fate of a handful of French 
troops had rested on her surety and her caution. 

Chateauroy spoke with a carelessness as of a man to a dog, 
turning to his Corporal. 

“ Victor, Mme. la Princesse honors you with the desire to see 
your toys again. Spread them out.” 

The savage authority of his general speech was softened for 
sake of his guest’s presence, but there was a covert tone in the 
words that made Cigarette murmur to herself : 

“ If he forget his promise, I will forgive him ! ” 

Cecil had not forgotten it; neither had he forgotten the lesson 
that this fair aristocrate had read him in the morning. He 
saluted his chief again, set the chessbox down upon the ledge 
of the marble balustrade, and stood silent, without once glanc- 
ing at the fair and haughty face that was more brilliant still 
in the African starlight than it had been in the noon sun of the 
Chasseurs’ Chambree. Courtesy was forbidden him as insult 
from a corporal to a nobly born beauty; he no more quarreled 
with the decree than with other inevitable consequences, inevi- 
table degradations, that followed on his entrance as a private 
under the French flag. He had been used to the impassable 
demarcations of Caste; he did not dispute them more now that 
he was without, than he had done when within, their magic 
pale. 

The carvings were passed from hand to hand as the Marquis’ 
six or eight guests, listlessly willing to be amused in the warmth 
of the evening after their dinner, occupied themselves with the 
ivory chess armies, cut with a skill and a finish worthy a Roman 
studio. Praise enough was awarded to the art, but none of 
them remembered the artist, who stood apart, grave, calm, with 
a certain serene dignity that could not be degraded because 
others chose to treat him as the station he filled gave them 
fit right to do. 

Only one glanced at him with a touch of wondering pity, 
softening her pride; she who had rejected the gift of those 
mimic squadrons. 

“ You were surely a sculptor once? ” she asked him with that 
graceful, distant kindness which she might have shown some 
Arab outcast. 



Photo by Sarony 








I 


















































CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE. 301 


“ Never, madame.” 

“ Indeed ! Then who taught you such exquisite art ? ” 

“ It cannot claim to be called art, madame.” 

She looked at him with an increased interest: the accent of 
his voice told her that this man, whatever he might be now, 
had once been a gentleman. 

“ Oh, yes ; it is perfect of its kind. Who was your master 
in it?” 

*“ A common teacher, madame — Necessity.” 

There was a very sweet gleam of compassion in the luster 
of her dark, dreaming eyes. 

“ Does necessity often teach so well ? ” 

“ In the ranks of our army, madame, I think it does — often, 
indeed, much better.” 

Chateauroy had stood by and heard, with as much impatience 
as he cared to show before guests whose rank was precious to 
the man who had still weakness enough to be ashamed that his 
father’s brave and famous life had first been cradled under the 
thatch roof of a little posting-house. 

“ Victor knows that neither he nor his men have any right 
to waste their time on such trash,” he said carelessly ; “ but the 
truth is they love the canteen so well that they will do anything 
to add enough to their pay to buy brandy.” 

She whom he had called Mme. la Princesse looked with a 
doubting surprise at the sculptor of the white Arab King she 
held. 

“ That man does not carve for brandy,” she thought. 

“ It must be a solace to many a weary hour in the barracks 
to be able to produce such beautiful trifles as these ? ” she said 
aloud. “ Surely you encourage such pursuits, monsieur ? ” 

“ Not I,” said Chateauroy, with a dash of his camp tone that 
he could not withhold. “ There are but two arts or virtues for 
a trooper to my taste — fighting and obedience.” 

“You should be in the Russian service, M. de Chateauroy,” 
said the lady with a smile, that, slight as it was, made the Mar- 
quis’ eyes flash fire. 

“ Almost I wish I had been,” he answered her ; “ men are 
made to keep their grades there, and privates who think them- 
selves fine gentlemen receive the lash they merit.” 

“ How he hates his Corporal ! ” thought Miladi, while she 
laid aside the White King once more. 

“ Nay,” interposed Chateauroy, recovering his momentary 


30 ^ 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


self-abandoment, “ since you like the bagatelles, do me honor 
enough to keep them.” 

“ Oh, no ! I offered your soldier his own price for them this 
morning, and he refused any.” 

Chateauroy swung round. 

“Ah, sacripant! you dared refuse your bits of ivory when 
you were honored by an offer for them.” 

Cecil stood silent ; his eyes met his chief’s steadily ; Chateau- 
roy had seen that look when his Chasseur had bearded him in 
the solitude of his tent, and demanded back the Pearl of the 
Desert. 

The Princess glanced at both; then she stooped her elegant 
head slightly to the Marquis. 

“ Do not blame your Corporal unjustly through me, I pray 
you. He refused any price, but he offered them to me very 
gracefully as a gift, though of course it was not possible that 
I should accept them so.” 

“ The man is the most insolent l^rron in the service,” mut- 
tered her host, as he motioned Cecil back off the terrace. “ Get 
you gone, sir, and leave your toys here, or I will have them 
broken up by a hammer.” 

The words were low, that they should not offend the ears of 
the great ladies who were his listeners; but they were coarsely 
savage in their whispered command, and the Princess heard 
them. 

“ He has brought his Chasseur here only to humiliate him,” 
thought Miladi, with the same thought that flashed through 
the mind of the little Friend of the Flag where she hid among 
her rhododendrons. How the dainty aristocrat was very proud, 
but she was not so proud but that justice was stronger in her 
than pride; and a noble, generous temper mellowed the some- 
what too cold and languid negligence of one of the fairest and 
haughtiest women that ever adorned a court. She was too 
generous not to rescue anyone who suffered through her the 
slightest injustice, not to interfere when through her any mis- 
conception lighted on another; she saw, with her sex’s rapid 
perception and sympathy, that the man whom Chateauroy ad- 
dressed with the brutal insolence of a bully to his disobedient 
dog, had once been a gentleman, though he now held but the 
rank of a sous-officier in the Algerian Cavalry, and she saw 
that he suffered all the more keenly under an outrage he had 
no power to resist because of that enforced serenity, that dig- 


CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE. 303 

nity of silence and of patience, with which he stood before his 
tyrant. 

“ Wait,” she said, moving a little toward them, while she let 
her eyes rest on the carver of the sculptures with a grave com- 
passion, though she addressed his chief. “ You wholly mistake 
me. I laid no blame whatever on your Corporal. Let him take 
the chessmen back with him; I would on no account rob him 
of them. I can well understand that he does not care to part 
with such masterpieces of his art; and that he would not ap- 
praise them by their worth in gold only shows that he is a true 
artist, as doubtless also he is a true soldier.” 

The words were spoken with a gracious courtesy; the clear, 
cold tone of her habitual manner just marking in them still 
the difference of caste between her and the man for whom she 
interceded, as she would equally have interceded for a dog who 
should have been threatened with the lash because he had dis- 
pleased her. That very tone struck a sharper blow to Cecil 
than the insolence of his commander had power to deal him. 
His face flushed a little; he lifted his cap to her with a grave 
reverence, and moved away. 

“ I thank you, madame. Keep them, if you will so far honor 
me.” 

The words reached only her ear. In another instant he had 
passed away down the terrace steps, obedient to his chief’s 
dismissal. 

“ Ah ! have no kind scruples in keeping them, madame,” 
Chateauroy laughed to her, as she still held in her hand, doubt- 
fully, the White Sheik of the chess Arabs ; “ I will see that 
Bel-a-faire-peur, as they call him, does not suffer by losing these 
trumperies, which, I believe, old Zist-et-Zest, a veteran of ours 
and a wonderful carver, had really far more to do with ( produc- 
ing than he. You must not let your gracious pity be moved 
by such fellows as these troopers of mine; they are the most 
ingenious rascals in the world, and know as well how to produce 
a dramatic effect in your presence as they do how to drink and 
to swear when they are out of it.” 

“ Very possibly,” she said, with an indolent indifference; “ but 
that man was no actor, and I never saw a gentleman if he have 
not been one.” 

“ Like enough,” answered the Marquis. “ I believe many ‘ gen- 
tlemen ’ come in our ranks who have fled their native countries 
and broken all laws from the Decalogue to the Code Napoleon. 


304 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


So long as they fight well, we don’t ask their past criminalities. 
We cannot afford to throw away a good sabreur because he has 
made his own land too hot to hold him.” 

“ Of what country is your Corporal, then ? ” 

“ I have not an idea. I imagine his past must have been 
something very black indeed, for the slightest trace of it has 
never, that I know of, been allowed to let slip from him. He 
encourages the men in every insubordination, buys their favor 
with every sort of stage trick, thinks himself the finest gentle- 
man in the whole brigades of Africa, and ought to have been 
shot long ago, if he had had his real deserts.” 

She let her glance dwell on him with a contemplation that 
was half contemptuous amusement, half unexpressed dissent. 

“ I wonder he has not been, since you have the ruling of his 
fate,” she said, with a slight smile lingering about the proud, 
rich softness of her lips. 

“ So do I.” 

There was a gaunt, grim, stem significance in the three 
monosyllables that escaped him unconsciously ; it made her turn 
and look at him more closely. 

“ How has he offended you ? ” she asked. 

Chateauroy laughed off the question. 

“ In a thousand ways, madame. Chiefly because I received 
my regimental training under one who followed the traditions 
of the Armies of Egypt and the Rhine, and have, I confess, 
little tolerance, in consequence, of a rebel who plays the martyr, 
and a soldier who is too effeminate an idler to do anything 
except attitudinize in interesting situations to awaken sym- 
pathy.” 

She listened with something of distaste upon her face where 
she still leaned against the marble balustrade, toying with the 
ivory Bedouins. 

“ I am not much interested in military discussions,” she said 
coldly, “ but I imagine — if you will pardon me for saying so — 
that you do your Corporal some little injustice here. I should 
not fancy he i affects ’ anything, to judge from the very good 
tone of his manners. For the rest, I shall not keep the chess- 
men without making him fitting payment for them; since he 
declines money, you will tell me what form that had better take 
to be of real and welcome service to a Chasseur d’Afrique.” 

Chateauroy, more incensed than he chose or dared to show, 
bowed courteously, but with a grim, ironic smile. 


CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE. 


305 


“ If you really insist, give him a Napoleon or two whenever 
you see him; he will be very happy to take it and spend it au 
cabaret, though he played the aristocrat to-day. But you are 
too good to him, he is one of the very worst of my pratiques; 
and you are as cruel to me in refusing to deign to accept my 
trooper’s worthless bagatelles at my hands.” 

She bent her superb head silently, whether in acquiescence or 
rejection he could not well resolve with himself, and turned 
to the staff officers, among them the heir of a princely semi- 
royal French House, who surrounded her, and sorely begrudged 
the moments she had given to those miniature carvings and the 
private soldier who had wrought them. She was no coquette; 
she was of too imperial a nature, had too lofty a pride, and 
was too difficult to charm or to enchain; but those meditative, 
brilliant, serene eyes had a terrible gift of wakening without 
ever seeking love, and of drawing without ever recompensing 
homage. 

Crouched down among her rose-hued covert, Cigarette had 
watched and heard ; her teeth set tightly, her breath coming and 
going swiftly, her hand clinched close on the butts of her pis- 
tols; fiery curses, with all the infinite variety in cursing of a 
barrack repertoire, chasing one another in hot, fast mutterings 
off those bright lips, that should have known nothing except 
a child’s careless and innocent song. 

“ Comme elle est belle ! comme elle est belle ! ” she whispered 
every now and then to herself, with a new, bitter, serious mean- 
ing in the whisper that had, with all its hate, something pathetic 
too. She had never looked at a beautiful, high-born woman be- 
fore, holding them in gay, satirical disdain as mere papillons 
rouants who could not prime a revolver and fire it off to save 
their own lives, if ever such need arose; a depth of ignorance 
that was, to the vivandiere’s view, the ne plus ultra of crassitude 
and impotence. But now she studied one through all the fine, 
quickened, unerring instincts of jealousy; and there is no in- 
stinct in the world that gives such thorough appreciation of the 
very rival it reviles. She saw the courtly negligence, the regal 
grace, the fair, brilliant loveliness, the delicious, serene languor, 
of a pure aristocrate for the very first time to note them, and 
they made her heart sick with a new and deadly sense; they 
moved her much as the white, delicate carvings of the lotus- 
lilies and the lentiscus-leaves had done; they, like the carvings, 
showed her all she had missed. She dropped her head suddenly 


306 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


like a wounded bird, and the racy, vindictive camp oaths died 
off her lips. She thought of herself as she had danced that mad 
bacchic bamboula amid the crowd of shouting, stamping, 
drunken, half-infuriated soldiery ; and for the moment she 
hated herself more even than she hated that patrician yonder. 

“ I know what he meant now ! ” she pondered, and her 
spirited, sparkling, brunette face was dark and weary, like a 
brown, sun-lightened brook over whose radiance the heavy 
shadow of some broad-spread eagle’s wings hovers, hiding the 
sun. 

She looked once, twice, thrice, more inquiringly, envyingly, 
thirstily; then, as the band under the cedars rolled out their 
music afresh, and light laughter echoed to her from the terrace, 
she turned and wound herself back under the cover of the 
shrubs; not joyously and mischievously as she had come, but 
almost as slowly, almost as sadly, as a hare that the greyhounds 
have coursed drags itself through the grasses and ferns. 

Once through the cactus hedge her old spirit returned; she 
shook herself angrily with petulant self-scorn; she swore a 
little, and felt that the fierce, familiar words did her good like 
brandy poured down her throat; she tossed her head like a colt 
that rebels against the gall of the curb; then, fleet as a fawn, 
she dashed down the moonlit road at topmost speed. “ Diantre ! 
she can’t do what I do ! ” she thought. 

And she ran the faster, and sang a drinking-song of the 
Spahis all the louder, because still at her heart a dull pain was 
aching. 


CHAPTER XXL 


CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA. 

Cigarette always went fast. She had a bird-like way of skim- 
ming her ground that took her over it with wonderful swift- 
ness; all the tassels, and ribbon knots, and sashes with which 
her uniform was rendered so gay and so distinctive fluttering 
behind her; and her little military boots, with the bright spurs 
twinkling, flying over the earth too lightly for a speck of dust, — 
though it lay thick as August suns could parch it, — to rest upon 
her. Thus she went now, along the lovely moonlight; singing 
her drinking song so fast and so loud that, had it been any 
other than this young fire-eater of the African squadrons, it 
might have been supposed she sang out of fear and bravado — 
two things, however, that never touched Cigarette; for she ex- 
ulted in danger as friskily as a young salmon exults in the first 
fresh, crisp, tumbling crest of a sea-wave, and would have 
backed up the most vainglorious word she could have spoken 
with the cost of her life, had need been. Suddenly, as she went, 
she heard a shout on the still night air — very still, now that the 
lights, and the melodies, and the laughter of Chateauroy’s villa 
lay far behind, and the town of Algiers was yet, distant, with 
its lamps glittering down by the sea. 

The shout was, “A moi, Roumis! Pour la France!” And 
Cigarette knew the voice, ringing melodiously and calmly still, 
though it gave the sound of alarm. 

“ Cigarette au secour ! ” she cried in answer ; she had cried it 
many a time over the heat of battlefields, and when the 
wounded men in the dead of the sickly night writhed under the 
knife of the camp-thieves. If she had gone like the wind be- 
fore, she went like the lightning now. 

A few yards onward she saw a confused knot of horses and 
of riders struggling one with another in a cloud of white dust, 
silvery and hazy in the radiance of the moon. 

The center figure was Cecil’s; the four others were Arabs, 
armed to the teeth and mad with drink, who had spent the 
whole day in drunken debauchery; pouring in raki down their 

307 


308 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


throats until they were wild with its poisonous fire, and had 
darted headlong, all abreast, down out of the town; overriding 
all that came in their way, and lashing their poor beasts with 
their sabers till the horses’ flanks ran blood. Just as they 
neared Cecil they had knocked aside and trampled over a worn- 
out old colon, of age too feeble for him to totter in time from 
their path. Cecil had reined up and shouted to them to pause ; 
they, inflamed with the perilous drink, and senseless with the 
fury which seems to possess every Arab once started in a race 
neck-to-neck, were too blind to see, and too furious to care, 
that they were faced by a soldier of France, but rode down 
on him at once, with their curled sabers flashing round their 
heads. His horse stood the shock gallantly, and he sought at 
first only to parry their thrusts and to cut through their stal- 
lions’ reins ; but the latter were chain bridles, and only notched 
his sword as the blade struck them, and the former became too 
numerous and too savagely dealt to be easily played with in 
carte and tierce. The Arabs were dead-drunk, he saw at a 
glance, and had got the blood-thirst upon them; roused and 
burning with brandy and raki, these men were like tigers to 
deal with ; the words he had spoken they never heard, and their 
horses hemmed him in powerless, while their steel flashed on 
every side — they were not of the tribe of the Khalifa. 

If he struck not, and struck not surely, he saw that a few 
moments more of that moonlight night were all that he would 
live. He wished to avoid bloodshed, both because his sym- 
pathies were always with the conquered tribes, and because he 
knew that every one of these quarrels and combats between the 
vanquisher and the vanquished served further to widen the 
breach, already broad enough, between them. But it was no 
longer a matter of choice with him, as his shoulder was grazed 
by a thrust which, but for a swerve of his horse, would have 
pierced to his lungs; and the four riders, yelling like madmen, 
forced the animal back on his haunches, and assaulted him with 
breathless violence. He swept his own arm back, and brought 
his saber down straight through the sword-arm of the foremost ; 
the limb was cleft through as if the stroke of an ax had severed 
it, and, thrice infuriated, the Arabs closed in on him. The 
points of their weapons were piercing his harness when, sharp 
and swift, one on another, three shots hissed past him ; the near- 
est of his assailants fell stone dead, and the others, wounded 
and startled, loosed their hold, shook their reins, and tore off 


CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA. 


309 


down the lonely road, while the dead man’s horse, shaking his 
burden from him out of the stirrups, followed them at a head- 
long gallop through a cloud of dust. 

“ That was a pretty cut through the arm ; better had it been 
through the throat. Never do things by halves, ami Victor,” 
said Cigarette carelessly, as she thrust her pistols back into her 
sash, and looked, with the tranquil appreciation of a connois- 
seur, on the brown, brawny, naked limb, where it lay severed 
on the sand, with the hilt of the weapon still hanging in the 
sinewy fingers. Cecil threw himself from his saddle and gazed 
at her in bewildered amazement; he had thought those sure, 
cool, death-dealing shots had come from some Spahi or 
Chasseur. 

“ I owe* you my life ! ” he said rapidly. “ But — good God ! — 
you have shot the fellow dead ” 

Cigarette shrugged her shoulders with a contemptuous glance 
at the Bedouin’s corpse. 

“ To be sure — I am not a bungler.” 

“Happily for me, or I had been where he lies now. But 
wait — let me look ; there may be breath in him yet.” 

Cigarette laughed, offended and scornful, as with the offense 
and scorn of one whose first science was impeached. • 

“ Pas si bete ! Look and welcome ; but if you find any life 
in that Arbi, make a laugh of it before all the army to- 
morrow.” 

She was at her fiercest. A thousand new emotions had been 
roused in her that night, bringing pain with them, that she 
bitterly resented; and, moreover, this child of the Army of 
Africa caught fire at the flame of battle with instant contagion, 
and had seen slaughter around her from her first infancy. 

Cecil, disregarding her protest, stooped and raised the fallen 
Bedouin. He saw at a glance that she was right ; the lean, dark, 
lustful face was set in the rigidity of death; the bullet had 
passed straight through the temples. 

“ Did you never see a dead man before ? ” demanded Ciga- 
rette impatiently, as he lingered — even in this moment he had 
more thought of this Arbico than he had of her! 

He laid the Arab’s body gently down, and looked at her with 
a glance that, rightly or wrongly, she thought had a rebuke 
in it. 

“ Very many. But — it is never a pleasant sight, 
were in drink; they did not know what they did.” 


And they 


310 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ Pardieu ! What divine pity ! Good powder and ball were 
sore wasted, it seems; you would have preferred to lie there 
yourself, it appears. I beg your pardon for interfering with 
the preference.” 

Her eyes were flashing, her lips very scornful and wrathful. 
This was his gratitude! 

“Wait, wait,” said Cecil rapidly, laying his hand on her 
shoulder, as she flung herself away. “ My dear child, do not 
think me ungrateful. I know well enough I should be a dead 
man myself had it not been for your gallant assistance. Believe 
me, I thank you from my heart.” 

“ But you think me ‘ unsexed ’ all the same ! I see, beau 
lion ! ” m 

The word had rankled in her; she could launch it now with 
telling reprisal. 

He smiled; but he saw that this phrase, which she had over- 
heard, had not alone incensed, but had wounded her. 

“ Well, a little, perhaps,” he said gently. “ How should it be 
otherwise? And, for that matter, I have seen many a great 
lady look on and laugh her soft, cruel laughter, while the 
pheasants were falling by hundreds, or the stags being torn by 
the hounds. They called it ‘ sport/ but there was not much 
difference — in the mercy of it, at least — from your war. And 
they had not a tithe of your courage.” 

The answer failed to conciliate her; there was an accent of 
compassion in it that ill-suited her pride, and a lack of admira- 
tion that was not less new and unwelcome. 

“ It was well for you that I was unsexed enough to be able 
to send an ounce of lead into a drunkard ! ” she pursued with 
immeasurable disdain. “ If I had been like that dainty aris- 
tocrat down there — pardieu! it had been worse for you. I 
should have screamed, and fainted, and left you to be killed, 
while I made a tableau. Oh, he ! that is to be ‘ feminine/ is 
it not ? ” 

“ Where did you see that lady ? ” he asked in some surprise. 

“ Oh, I was there ! ” answered Cigarette, with a toss of her 
head southward to where the villa lay. “ I went to see how 
you would keep your promise.” 

“Well, you saw I kept it.”. 

She gave her little teeth a sharp click like the click of a 
trigger. 

“ Yes. And I would have forgiven you if you had broken it.” 


CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA. 


311 


“ W ould you ? I should not have forgiven myself.” 

“ Ah ! you are just like Marquise. And you will end like 
him.” 

“ Very probably.” 

She knitted her pretty brows, standing there in his path with 
her pistols thrust in her sash, arid her hands resting lightly on 
her hips, as a good workman rests after a neatly finished job, and 
her dainty fez set half on one side on her brown, tangled curls, 
while upon them the intense luster of the moonlight streamed, 
and in the dust, well-nigh at their feet, lay the gaunt, white- 
robed form of the dead Arab, with the olive, saturnine face 
turned upward to the stars. 

“ Why did you give those chessmen to that silver pheasant ? ” 
she asked him abruptly. 

“ Silver pheasant? ” 

“ Yes. See how she sweeps — sweeps — sweeps so languid, so 
brilliant* so useless — bah ! Why did you give them ? ” 

“ She admired them. It was not much to give.” 

“Diantre! You would not have given them to a daughter 
of the people.” 

“ Why not?” 

“ Why not ? Oh, he ! Because her hands would be hard, 
and brown, and coarse, not fit for those ivory puppets; but 
Miladi’s are white like the ivory, and cannot soil it. She will 
handle them so gracefully, for five minutes; and then buy a 
new toy, and let her lapdog break yours ! ” 

“ Like enough.” He said it with his habitual gentle temper, 
but there was a shadow of pain in the words. The chessmen 
had become in some sort like living things to him, through 
long association; he had parted from them not without regret, 
though for the moment courtesy and generosity of instinct had 
overcome it; and he knew that it was but too true how in all 
likelihood these trifles of his art, that had brought him many 
a solace and been his companion through many a lonely hour, 
would be forgotten by the morrow, where he had bestowed them, 
and at best put aside in a cabinet to lie unnoticed among 
bronzes or porcelain, or be set on some boudoir table to be idled 
with in the mimic warfare that would serve to cover some list- 
less flirtation. 

Cigarette, quick to sting, but as quick to repent using her 
sting, saw the regret in him; with the rapid, uncalculating 
liberality of an utterly unselfish and intensely impulsive na- 


312 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


ture, she hastened to make amends by saying what was like 
gall on her tongue in the utterance: 

“Tiens!” she said quickly. “ Perhaps she will value them 
more than that. I know nothing of the aristocrats — not I! 
When you were gone, she championed you against the Black 
Hawk. She told him that if you had not been a gentleman 
before you came into the ranks, she had never seen one. Ma 
cantche ! she spoke well, if you had but heard her.” 

“ She did!” 

She saw his glance brighten as it turned on her in a surprised 
gratification. 

“Well! What is there so wonderful?” 

Cigarette asked it with a certain petulance and doggedness; 
taking a namesake out of her breast-pocket, biting its end off, 
and striking a fusee. A word from this aristocrat was more 
welcome to him than a bullet that had saved his life ! 

Her generosity had gone very far, and, like most generosity, 
got nothing for its pains. 

He was silent a few moments, tracing lines in the dust with 
the point of his scabbard. Cigarette, with the cigar in her 
mouth, stamped her foot impatiently. 

“Corporal Victor! are you going to dream there all night? 
What is to be done with this dog of an Arbico ? ” 

She was angered by him; she was in the mood to make her- 
self seem all the rougher, fiercer, naughtier, and more callous. 
She had shot the man — pouf ! what of that ? She had shot men 
before, as all Africa knew. She would defend a half-fledged 
bird, a terrified sheep, a worn-out old cur; but a man! Men 
were the normal and natural food for pistols and rifles, she con- 
sidered. A state of society in which firearms had been un- 
known was a thing Cigarette had never heard of, and in which 
she would have contumeliously disbelieved if she had been told 
of it. 

Cecil looked up from his musing. He thought what a pity it 
was this pretty, graceful French kitten was such a bloodthirsty 
young panther at heart. 

“ I scarcely know what to do,” he answered her doubtfully. 
“ Put him across my saddle, poor wretch, I suppose ; the fray 
must be reported.” 

“ Leave that to me,” said Cigarette decidedly, and with a 
certain haughty patronage. “ I shot him — I will see the thing 
gets told right. It might be awkward for you ; they are growing 



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Photo by Byron 





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CIGARETTE EX CONDOTTIERA. 


313 


so squeamish about the Roumis killing the natives. Draw him 
to one side there, and leave him. The crows will finish his 
affair.” 

The coolness with which this handsome child disposed of the 
fate of what, a moment or two before, had been a sentient, 
breathing, vigorous frame, sent a chill through her hearer, 
though he had been seasoned by a decade of slaughter. 

“ No,” he said briefly. “ Suspicion might fall on some inno- 
cent passer-by. Besides — he shall have decent burial.” 

“ Burial for an Arbi — faugh ! ” cried Cigarette in derision. 
“ Parbleu, M. Bel-a-faire-peur, I have seen hundreds of our 
best lascars lie rotting on the plains with the birds’ beaks at 
their eyes and the jackals’ fangs in their flesh. What was good 
enough for them is surely good enough for him. You are an 
eccentric fellow — you ” 

He laughed a little. 

“ Time was when I should have begged you not to call me any 
such ‘bad form’! Eccentric! I have not genius enough for 
that.” 

“ Eh ? ” She did not understand him. “ Well, you want that 
carrion poked into the earth, instead of lying atop of it. I 
don’t see much difference myself. I would like to be in the 
sun as long as I could, I think, dead or alive. Ah! how odd 
it is to think one will be dead some day — never wake for the 
reveille — never hear the cannon or the caissons roll by — never 
stir when the trumpets sound the charge, but lie there dead — 
dead — dead — while the squadrons thunder above one’s grave! 
Droll, eh?” 

A momentary pathos softened her voice (which could melt 
and change into a wonderful music), where she stood in the 
glistening moonlight. That the time would ever come when 
her glad laughter would be hushed, when her young heart would 
beat no more, when the bright, abundant, passionate blood 
would bound no longer through her veins, when all the vi- 
vacious, vivid, sensuous charms of living would be ended for 
her forever, was a thing that she could no better bring home 
to her than a bird that sings in the light of the sun could be 
made to know that the time would come when its little, melodi- 
ous throat would be frozen in death, and give song never 
more. 

The tone touched him — made him think less and less of her 
as a dare-devil boy, as a reckless child-soldier, and more of her 


314 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


as what she was, than he had done before; he touched her al- 
most caressingly. 

“ Pauvre enfant ! I hope that day will be very distant from 
you. And yet — how bravely you risked death for me just 
now ! ” 

Cigarette, though accustomed to the lawless loves of the 
camp, flushed ever so slightly at the mere caress of his hand. 

“ Chut ! I risked nothing ! ” she said rapidly. “ As for death 
— when it comes, it comes. Every soldier carries it in his wallet, 
and it may jump out on him any minute. I would rather die 
young than grow old. Pardi ! age is nothing else but death that 
is conscious.” 

“ Where do you get your wisdom, little one ? ” 

T Wisdom? Bah! living is learning. Some people go through 
life with their eyes shut, and then grumble there is nothing to 
see in it!} Well — you want that Arbi buried? What a fancy! 
Look you, then; stay by him, since you are so fond of him, 
and I -will go and send some men to you with a stretcher to 
carry him down to the town. As for reporting, leave that to 
me. I shall tell them I left you on guard. That will square 
things if you are late at the barrack.” 

“ But that will give you so much trouble. Cigarette.” 

“ Trouble ? Morbleu ! Do you think I am like that silver 
pheasant yonder? Lend me your horse, and I shall be in the 
town in ten minutes ! ” 

She vaulted, as she spoke, into the saddle; he laid his hand 
on the bridle, and stopped her. 

“ Wait! I have not thanked you half enough, my brave little 
champion. How am I to show you my gratitude ? ” 

For a moment the bright, brown, changeful face, that could 
look so fiercely scornful, so sunnily radiant, so tempestuously 
passionate, and so tenderly childlike, in almost the same mo- 
ment, grew warm as the warm suns that had given their fire 
to her veins; she glanced at him almost shyly, while the moon- 
light slept lustrously in the dark softness of her eyes ; there was 
an intense allurement in her in that moment — the allurement 
of a woman’s loveliness, bitterly as she disdained a woman’s 
charms. It might have told him, more plainly than words, how 
best he could reward her for the shot that had saved him; yet, 
though a man on whom such beguilement usually worked only 
too easily and too often, it did not now touch him. He was 
grateful to her, but, despite himself, he was cold to her ; despite 





-V 


Photo by Byron 






CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA. 


315 


himself, the life which that little hand that he held had taken 
so lightly made it the hand of a comrade to be grasped in alli- 
ance, but never the hand of a mistress to steal to his lips and 
to lie in his breast. 

Her rapid and unerring instinct made her feel that keenly 
and instantly; she had seen too much passion not to know when 
it was absent. The warmth passed off her face, her teeth 
clinched; she shook the bridle out of his hold. 

“ Take gratitude to Miladi there! She will value fine words; 
I set no count on them. I did no more for you than I have 
done scores of times for my Spahis. Ask them how many I 
have shot with my own hand ! ” 

In another instant she was away like a sirocco; a whirlwind 
of dust, that rose in the moonlight, marking her flight as she 
rode full gallop to Algiers. 

“ A kitten with the tigress in her,” thought Cecil, as he seated 
himself on a broken pile of stone to keep his vigil over the 
dead Arab. It was not that he was callous to the generous 
nature of the little Friend of the Flag, or that he was insensi- 
ble either to the courage that beat so dauntlessly in her pulses, 
or to the piquant, picturesque grace that accompanied even her 
wildest actions ; but she had nothing of her sex’s charm for him. 
He thought of her rather as a young soldier than as a young 
girl. She amused him as a wayward, bright, mischievous, au- 
dacious boy might have done; but she had no other interest 
for him. He had given her little attention; a waltz, a cigar, 
a passing jest, were all he had bestowed on the little lionne of 
the Spahis corps ; and the deepest sentiment she had ever awak- 
ened in him was an involuntary pity — pity for this flower which 
blossomed on the polluted field of war, and under the poison- 
dropping branches of lawless crime. A flower v bright-hued and 
sun-fed, glancing with the dews of youth now, when it had just 
unclosed, in all its earliest beauty, but already soiled and tainted 
by the bed from which it sprang, and doomed to be swept away 
with time, scentless and loveless, down the rapid, noxious cur- 
rent of that broad, black stream of vice on which it now floated 
so heedlessly. 

Even now his thoughts drifted from her almost before the 
sound of the horse’s hoofs had died where he sat on a loose pile 
of stones, with the lifeless limbs of the Arab at his feet. 

“ Who was it in my old life that she is like ? ” he was musing. 
It was the deep-blue, dreaming, haughty eyes of “ Miladi ” that 


316 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


he was bringing back to memory, not the brown, mignon face 
that had been so late close to his in the light of the moon. 

Meanwhile, on his good gray, Cigarette rode like a true Chas- 
seur herself. She was used to the saddle, and would ride a 
wild desert colt without stirrup or bridle; balancing her supple 
form now on one foot, now on the other, on the animal’s naked 
back, while they flew at full speed, with a skill and address that 
would have distanced the best heroines of manege and hip- 
podrome. Not so fantastically, but full as speedily, she dashed 
down into the city, scattering all she met with right and left, 
till she rode straight up to the barracks of the Chasseurs 
d’Afrique. At the entrance, as she reined up, she saw the very 
person she wanted, and signed him to her as carelessly as if he 
were a conscript instead of that powerful officer, Frangois Vire- 
flau, captain and adjutant. 

“ Hola! ” she cried, as she signaled him; Cigarette was privi- 
leged all through the army, and would have given the langue 
verte to the Emperor himself, had she met. him. “Adjutant 
Vireflau, I come to tell you a good story for your folios ma- 
tricules. There is your Corporal there — le beau Victor — has 
been attacked by four drunken dogs of Arbicos, dead-drunk, 
and four against one. He fought them superbly, but he would 
only parry, not thrust, because he knows how strict the rules 
are about dealing with the scoundrels — even when they are 
murdering you, parbleu! He has behaved splendidly. I tell 
you so. And he was so patient with these dogs that he would 
not have killed one of them. But I did; shot one straight 
through the brain — a beautiful thing — and he lies on the Oran 
road now. Victor would not leave him, for fear some passer-by 
should be thought guilty of a murder. So I came on to tell 
you, and ask you to send some men up for the jackal’s body. 
Ah! he is a fine soldier, that Bel-a-faire-peur of yours. Why 
don’t you give him a step — two steps — three steps? Diantre! 
It is not like F ranee to leave him a Corporal ! ” 

Vireflau listened attentively — a short, lean, black-visaged 
campaigner, who yet relaxed into a grim half-smile as the vi- 
vandiere addressed him with that air, as of a generalissimo ad- 
dressing a subordinate, which always characterized Cigarette 
the more strongly the higher the grade of her companion or 
opponent. 

“ Always eloquent, pretty one ! ” he growled. “ Are you sure 
he did not begin the fray ? ” 


CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA. 317 

u Ma cantche ! Don’t I tell you the four Arabs were like 
four devils ! They knocked down an old colon, and Bel-a-faire- 
peur tried to prevent their doing more mischief, and they set 
on him like so many wild-cats. He kept his temper wonder- 
fully; he always tries to preserve order; you can’t say so much 
of your riff-raff, Captain Vireflau, commonly! Here! this is 
his horse. Send some men to him; and mind the thing is re- 
ported fairly, and to his credit, to-morrow.” 

With which command, given as with the air of a commander- 
in-chief, in its hauteur and its nonchalance, Cigarette vaulted 
off the charger, flung the bridle to a soldier, and was away and 
out of sight before Frangois Vireflau had time to consider 
whether he should laugh at her caprices, as all the army did, 
or resent her insolence to his dignity. But he was a good- 
natured man, and, what was better, a just one; and Cigarette 
had judged rightly that the tale she had told would weigh well 
with him to the credit side of his Corporal, and would not reach 
his Colonel in any warped version that could give pretext for 
any fresh exercise of tyranny over “ Bel-a-faire-peur ” under 
the title of “ discipline.” 

“ Dieu de Dieu ! ” thought his champion as she made her 
way through the gas-lit streets. “I swore to have my ven- 
geance on him. It is a droll vengeance, to save his life, and 
plead his cause with Vireflau ! Ho matter ! One could not look 
on and let a set of Arbicos kill a good lascar of France; and 
the thing that is just must be said, let it go as it will against 
one’s grain. Public Welfare before Private Pique ! ” 

A grand and misty generality which consoled Cigarette fcr 
an abandonment of her sworn revenge which she felt was a 
weakness utterly unworthy of her, and too much like that in- 
consequent weathercock, that useless, insignificant part of cre- 
ation, those objects of her supreme derision and contempt, those 
frivolous trifles which she wondered the good God had ever 
troubled himself to make — namely, “ Les Femmes.” 

“ Hola, Cigarette!” cried the Zouave Tata, leaning out of 
a little casement of the As de Pique as she passed it. “ A la 
bonne heure, ma belle! Come in; we have the devil’s own fun 
here ” 

“Ho doubt!” retorted the Friend of the Flag. “It would 
be odd if the master-fiddler would not fiddle for his own ! ” 

Through the window, and over the sturdy shoulders, in their 
canvas shirt, of the hero Tata, the room was visible — full of 


318 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


smoke, through which the lights glimmered like the sun in a 
fog; reeking with bad wines, crowded with laughing, bearded 
faces, and the battered beauty of women revelers, while on 
the table, singing with a voice Mario himself could not have 
rivaled for exquisite sweetness, was a slender Zouave gesticu- 
lating with the most marvelous pantomime, while his melodious- 
tones rolled out the obscenest and wittiest ballad that ever was 
caroled in a guinguette. 

“Come in, my pretty one!” entreated Tata, stretching out 
his brawny arms. “ You will die of laughing if you hear Gris- 
Gris to-night — such a song ! ” 

“ A pretty song, yes — for a pigsty ! ” said Cigarette, with a 
glance into the chamber; and she shook his hand off her, and 
went on down the street. A night or two before a new song 
from Gris-Gris, the best tenor in the whole army, would have 
been paradise to her, and she would have vaulted through the 
window at a single bound into the pandemonium. Mow, she 
did not know why, she found no charm in it. 

And she went quietly home to her little straw-bed in her 
garret, and curled herself up like a kitten to sleep; but for 
the first time in her young life sleep did not come readily to her, 
and when it did come, for the first time found a restless sigh 
upon her laughing mouth, as she murmured, dreaming : 
“ Comme elle est belle ! Comme elle est belle ! ” 


CHAPTER XXII. 


THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING. 

“Fighting in the Kabaila, life was well enough; but here!” 
thought Cecil as, earlier awake than those of his Chambree, 
he stood looking down the lengthy, narrow room where the 
men lay asleep along the bare floor. 

Tired as overworked cattle, and crouched or stretched like 
worn-out, homeless dogs, they had never wakened as he had 
noiselessly harnessed himself, and he' looked at them with that 
interest in other lives that had come to him through adversity; 
for if misfortune had given him strength, it had also given 
him sympathy. 

They were of marvelously various types — those sleepers 
brought under one roof by fates the most diverse. Close beside 
a huge and sinewy brute of an Auvergnat, whose coarse, bestial 
features and massive bull’s head were fitter for a galley-slave 
than a soldier, were the lithe, exquisite limbs and the oval, deli- 
cate face of a man from the Valley of the Rhone. Beneath a 
canopy of flapping, tawny wild-beast skins, the spoils of his 
own hands, was flung the naked torso of one of the splendid 
peasants of the Sables d’Olonne; one steeped so long in blood 
and wine and alcohol that he had forgotten the blue, bright 
waves that broke on the western shores of his boyhood’s home, 
save when he muttered thirstily in his dreams of the cool sea, 
as he was muttering now. Next him, curled, dog-like, with its 
round, black head meeting its feet, was a wiry frame on which 
every muscle was traced like network, and the skin burned 
black as jet under twenty years of African sun. The midnight 
streets of Paris had seen its birth, the thieves’ quarter had been 
its nest; it had no history, it had almost no humanity; it was 
a perfect machine for slaughter, no more — who had ever tried 
to make it more ? 

Further on lay, sleeping fitfully, a boy of scarcely more than 
seventeen, with rounded cheeks and fair, white brow like a 
child’s, whose uncovered chest was delicate as a girl’s, and 
through whose long, brown lashes tears in his slumber were 

319 


320 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


stealing as his rosy mouth murmured, “ Mere ! mere ! Pauvre 
mere ! ” He was a young conscript taken from the glad vine- 
country of the Loire, and from the little dwelling up in the 
rock beside the sunny, brimming river, and half -buried under 
its grape leaves and coils, that was dearer to him than is the 
palace to its heir. There were many others beside these; and 
Cecil looked at them with those weary, speculative, meditative 
fancies which, very alien to his temperament, stole on him 
occasionally in the privations and loneliness of his existence 
here — loneliness in the midst of numbers, the most painful of 
all solitude. 

Life was bearable enough to him in the activity of campaign- 
ing, in the excitement of warfare; there were times even when 
it yielded him absolute enjoyment, and brought him interests 
more genuine and vivid than any he had known in his former 
world. But, in the monotony and the confinement of the bar- 
rack routine, his days were often intolerable to him. Morning 
after morning he rose to the same weary round of duty, 
the same series of petty irritations, of physical privations, of 
irksome repetitions, to take a toss of black, rough coffee, and 
begin the day knowing it would bring with it endless annoy- 
ances without one gleam of hope. Rose to spend hours on the 
exerise-ground in the glare of a burning sun, railed at if a 
trooper’s accouterments were awry, or an insubordinate scoun- 
drel had pawned his regulation shirt; to be incessantly witness 
of tyrannies and cruelties he was powerless to prevent, and 
which he continually saw undo all he had done, and render men 
desperate whom he had spent months in endeavoring to make 
contented; to have as the only diversions for his few instants 
of leisure loathsome pleasures that disgusted the senses they 
were meant to indulge, and that brought him to scenes of low 
debauchery from which all the old, fastidious instincts of his 
delicate, luxurious taste recoiled. With such a life as this, he 
often wondered regretfully why, out of the many Arab swords 
that had crossed his own, none had gone straight to his heart; 
why, out of the many wounds that had kept him hovering on 
the confines of the grave, none had ever brought him the end 
and the oblivion of death. 

Had he been subject to all the miseries and personal hard- 
ships of his present career, but had only owned the power to 
command, to pardon, to lead, and to direct, as Alan Bertie 
before him had done with his Irregular Cavalry in the Indian 


THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KINO. 


321 


plains, — such a thought would never have crossed him ; he was 
far too thorough a soldier not then to have been not only satis- 
fied, but happy. What made his life in the barracks of Algiers 
so bitter were the impotency, the subjection, the compelled 
obedience to a bidding that he knew often capricious and un- 
just as it was cruel; which were so unendurable to his natural 
pride, yet to which he had hitherto rendered undeviating ad- 
hesion and submission, less for his own sake than for that of 
the men around him, who, he knew, would back him in revolt 
to the. death, and be dealt with, for such loyalty to him, in the 
fashion that the vivandiere’s words had pictured with such 
terrible force and truth. 

“ Is it worth while to go on with it? Would it not be the 
wiser way to draw my own saber across my throat ? ” he 
thought, as the brutalized companionship in which his life was 
spent struck on him all the more darkly because, the night be- 
fore, a woman’s voice and a woman’s face had recalled memories 
buried for twelve long years. 

But, after so long a stand-up fight with fate, so long a vic- 
tory over the temptation to let himself drift out in an opium- 
sleep from the world that had grown so dark to him, it was 
not in him to give under now. In his own way he had found 
a duty to do here, though he would have laughed at anyone 
who should have used the word “ duty ” in connection with 
him. In his own way, amid these wild spirits, who would have 
been blown from the guns’ mouths to serve him, he had made 
good the “ Coeur vaillant se fait Royaume ” of his House. And 
he was, moreover, by this time, a French soldier at heart and 
in habit, in almost all things — though the English gentleman 
was not dead in him under the harness of a Chasseur d’Afrique. 

This morning he roused the men of his Chambree with that 
kindly gentleness which had gone so far in its novelty to attach 
their liking; went through the customary routine of his post 
with that exactitude and punctuality of which he was always 
careful to set the example ; made his breakfast off some wretched 
onion-soup and a roll of black bread ; rode fifty miles in the blaz- 
ing heat of the African day at the head of a score of his 
chasses-marais on convoy duty, bringing in escort a long string 
of maize-wagons from the region of the Kabaila, which, with- 
out such guard, might have been swooped down on and borne 
off by some predatory tribe; and returned, jaded, weary, parched 
with thirst, scorched through with heat, and covered with white 


322 


UNDER, TWO FLAGS. 


dust, to be kept waiting in his saddle, by his Colonel’s orders, 
outside the barrack for three-quarters of an hour, whether to 
receive a command or a censure he was left in ignorance. 

When the three-quarters had passed, he was told M. le Com- 
mandant had gone long ago, and did not require him! 

Cecil said nothing. 

Yet he reeled slightly as he threw himself out of saddle; 
a nausea and a giddiness had come on him. To have passed 
nigh an hour motionless in his stirrups, with the skies like 
brass above him, while he was already worn with riding from 
sunrise well-nigh to sunset, with little to appease hunger and 
less to slake thirst, made him, despite himself, stagger dizzily 
under a certain sense of blindness and exhaustion as he dis- 
mounted. 

The Chasseur who had brought him the message caught his 
arm eagerly. 

“ Are you hurt, mon Caporal ? ” 

Cecil shook his head. The speaker was one known in the 
regiment as Petit Picpon, who had begun life as a gamin of 
Paris, and now bade fair to make one of the most brilliant of 
the soldiers of Africa. Petit Picpon had but one drawback 
to his military career — he was always in insubordination; the 
old gamin dare-devilry was not dead in him, and never would 
die; and Petit Picpon accordingly was perpetually a hero in 
the field and a ragamuffin in the times of peace. Of course 
he was always arrayed against authority, and now — being fond 
of his galonne with that curious doglike, deathless attachment 
that these natures, all reckless, wanton, destructive, and mis- 
chievous though they be, so commonly bestow — he muttered a 
terrible curse under his fiercely curled mustaches. 

“ If the Black Hawk were nailed up in the sun like a kite 
on a barn-door, I would drive twenty nails through his 
throat ! ” 

Cecil turned rapidly on him. 

“ Silence, sir ! or I must report you. Another speech like 
that, and you shall have a turn at Beylick.” 

It went to his heart to rebuke the poor fellow for an out- 
burst of indignation which had its root in regard for himself, 
but he knew that to encourage it by so much even as by an 
expression of gratitude for the affection borne him, would be 
to sow further and deeper the poison-seeds of that inclination 
to mutiny and that rebellious hatred against their chief already 


THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING. 323 

only planted too strongly in the squadrons under Chateauroy’s 
command. 

Petit Picpon looked as crestfallen as one of his fraternity 
could; he knew well enough that what he had said could get 
him twenty blows of the matraque, if his corporal chose to 
give him up to judgment; but he had too much of the Parisian 
in him still not to have his say, though he should be shot for it. 

“ Send me to Beylick, if you like, Corporal,” he said sturdily ; 
<l I was in wrath for you — not for myself. Diantre ! ” 

Cecil was infinitely more touched than he dared, for sake of 
discipline, for sake of the speaker himself, to show; but his 
glance dwelt on Petit Picpon with a look that the quick, black, 
monkey-like eyes of the rebel were swift to read. 

“I know,” he said gravely. “I do not misjudge you; but, 
at the same time, my name must never serve as a pretext for 
insubordination. Such men as care to pleasure me will best do 
so in making my duty light by their own self-control and obedi- 
ence to the rules of their service.” 

He led his horse away, and Petit Picpon went on an errand 
he had been sent to do in the streets for one of the officers. 
Picpon was unusually thoughtful and sober in deportment for 
him, since he was usually given to making his progress along 
a road, taken unobserved by those in command over him, 
“ faisant roue,” with hands and heels in the dexterous somer- 
saults of his early days. 

How he went along without any unprofessional antics, biting 
the tip of a smoked-out cigar, which he had picked up off the 
pavement in sheer instinct, retained from the old times when 
he had used to rush in, the foremost of la queue, into the for- 
saken theaters of Bouffes or of Varietes in search for those 
odds and ends which the departed audience might have left 
behind them — one of the favorite modes of seeking a livelihood 
with the Parisian night-birds. 

“ Dame ! I will give it up then,” resolved Picpon, half aloud, 
valorously. 

How Picpon had come forth on evil thoughts intent. 

His officer — a careless and extravagant man, the richest man 
in the regiment — had given him a rather small velvet bag, 
sealed, with directions to take it to a certain notorious beauty 
of Algiers, whose handsome Moresco eyes smiled — or, at least, 
he believed so — exclusively for the time on the sender. Picpon 
was very quick, intelligent, and much liked by his superiors, 


324 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


so that he was often employed on errands; and the tricks he 
played in the execution thereof were so adroitly done that 
they were never detected. Picpon had chuckled to himself over 
this mission. It was but the work of an instant for the lithe, 
nimble fingers of the ex-gamin to undo the bag without touch- 
ing the seal; to see that it contained a hundred Napoleons with 
a note; to slip the gold into the folds of his ceinturon; to fill 
up the sack with date-stones; to make it assume its original 
form so that none could have imagined it had been touched, 
and to proceed with it thus to the Moorish lionne’s dwelling. 
The negro who always opened her door would take it in ; Picpon 
would hint to him to be careful, as it contained some rare and 
rich Sweetmeats; negro nature, he well knew, would impel him 
to search for the bonbons; and the bag, under his clumsy treat- 
ment, would bear plain marks of having been tampered with, 
and, as the African had a most thievish reputation, he would 
never be believed if he swore himself guiltless. Voila! here 
was a neat trick! If it had a drawback, it was that it was too 
simple, too little risque. A child might do it. 

Still — a hundred Naps! What fat geese, what flagons of 
brandy, what dozens of wine, what rich soups, what handsome 
moukieras, what tavern banquets they would bring! Picpon 
had chuckled again as he arranged the little bag so carefully, 
with its date-stones, and pictured the rage of the beautiful 
Moor when she should discover the contents and order the stick 
to her negro. Ah ! that was what Picpon called fun ! 

To appreciate the full force of such fun, it is necessary to 
have also appreciated the gamin. To understand the legitimate 
aspect such a theft bore, it is necessary to have also understood 
the unrecordable codes that govern the genus pratique, into 
which the genus gamin, when at maturity, develops. 

Picpon was quite in love with his joke; it was only a good 
joke in his sight; and, indeed, men need to live as hardly as 
an African soldier lives, to estimate the full temptation that 
gold can have when you have come to look on a cat as very 
good eating, and to have nothing to gnaw but a bit of old shoe- 
leather through the whole of the long hours of a burning day 
of fatigue-duty; and to estimate, as well, the full width and 
depth of the renunciation that made him mutter now so valor- 
ously, “ Dame ! I will give it up, then ! ” 

Picpon did not know himself as he said it. Yet he turned 
down into a lonely, narrow lane, under marble walls, over- 


THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING. 


325 


topped with fig and palm from some fine gardens; undid the 
hag for the second time ; whisked out the date-stones and threw 
them over the wall, so that they should be out of his reach if 
he repented; put back the Napoleons, closed the little sack, ran 
as hard as he could scamper to his destination, delivered his 
charge into the fair lady’s own hands, and relieved his feelings 
by a score of somersaults along the pavement as fast as ever he 
could go. 

“ Ma cantche ! ” he thought, as he stood on his head, with his 
legs at an acute angle in the air, a position very favored by 
him for moments of reflection — he said his brain worked better 
upside down. “ Ma cantche ! what a weakness, what a weak- 
ness ! What remorse to have yielded to it ! Beneath you, Pic- 
pon — utterly beneath you. Just because that ci-devant says 
such follies please him in us ! ” 

Picpon (then in his gamin stage) had been enrolled in the 
Chasseurs at the same time with the “ ci-devant,” as they called 
Bertie, and, following his gamin nature, had exhausted all his 
resources of impudence, maliciousness, and power of torment- 
ing, on the “ aristocrat ” — somewhat disappointed, however* 
that the utmost ingenuities of his insolence and even his ma- 
lignity never succeeded in breaking the “ aristocrat’s ” silence 
and contemptuous forbearance from all reprisal. For the first 
two years the hell-on-earth — which life with a Franco-Arab 
regiment seemed to Cecil — was a hundredfold embittered by the 
brutalized jests and mosquito-like torments of this little odious 
chimpanzee of Paris. 

One day, howlver, it chanced that a detachment of Chasseurs, 
of which Cecil was one, was cut to pieces by such an over- 
whelming mass of Arabs that scarce a dozen of them could 
force their way through the Bedouins with life ; he was among 
those few, and a flight at full speed was the sole chance of 
regaining their encampment. Just as he had shaken his bridle 
free of the Arab’s clutch, and had mowed himself a clear path 
through their ranks, he caught sight of his young enemy, Pic- 
pon, on the ground, with a lance broken off in his ribs ; guarding 
his head, with bleeding hands, as the horses trampled over him. 
To make a dash at the boy, though to linger a moment was to 
risk certain death; to send his steel through an Arab who came 
in his way; to lean down and catch hold of the lad’s sash; to 
swing him up into his saddle and throw him across it in front 
of him, and to charge afresh through the storm of musket-balls, 


326 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


and ride on thus burdened, was the work of ten seconds with 
“ Bel-a-faire-peur.” And he brought the boy safe over a stretch 
of six leagues in a flight for life, though the imp no more de- 
served the compassion than a scorpion that has spent all its 
noxious day stinging at every point of uncovered flesh would 
merit tenderness from the hand it had poisoned. 

When he was swung down from the saddle and laid in front 
of a vedette fire, sheltered from the bitter north wind that was 
then blowing cruelly, the bright, black, ape-like eyes of the 
Parisian diablotin opened with a strange gleam in them. 

“ Picpon s’en souviendra,” he murmured. 

And Picpon had kept his word; he had remembered often, 
he remembered now; standing on his head and thinking of his 
hundred Napoleons surrendered because thieving and lying in 
the regiment gave pain to that oddly prejudiced “ ci-devant.” 
This was the sort of loyalty that the Franco- Arabs rendered; 
this was the sort of influence that the English Guardsman 
exercised among his Roumis. 

. Meantime, while Picpon made a human cone of himself, to 
the admiration of the polyglot crowd of the Algerine street, 
Cecil himself, having watered, fed, and littered down his tired 
horse, made his way to a little cafe he commonly frequented, 
and spent the few sous he could afford on an iced draught of 
lemon-flavored drink. Eat he could not; overfatigue had given 
him a nausea for food, and the last hour, motionless in the 
intense glow of the afternoon sun, had brought that racking 
pain through his temples which assailed him*rarely now, but 
which in his first years in Africa had given him many hours 
of agony. He could not stay in the cafe; it was the hour of 
dinner for many, and the odors, joined with the noise, were 
insupportable to him. 

A few doors farther in the street, which was chiefly of Jew- 
ish and Moslem shops, there was a quaint place kept by an old 
Moor, who had some of the rarest and most beautiful treasures 
of Algerian workmanship in his long, dark, silent chambers. 
With this old man Cecil had something of a friendship; he had 
protected him one day from the mockery and outrage of some 
drunken Indigenes, and the Moor, warmly grateful, was ever 
ready to give him a cup of coffee and a hubble-bubble in the 
stillness of his dwelling. Its resort was sometimes welcome to 
him as the one spot, quiet and. noiseless, to which he could 


THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING. 327 

escape out of the continuous turmoil of street and of barrack, 
and he went thither now. He found the old man sitting cross- 
legged behind hisr counter; a noble-looking, aged Mussulman, 
with a long beard like white silk, with cashmeres and broidered 
stuffs of peerless texture hanging above his head, and all around 
him things of silver, of gold, of ivory, of amber, of feathers, 
of bronze, of emeralds, of ruby, of beryl, whose rich colors 
glowed through the darkness. 

“Ho coffee, no sherbet; thanks, good father,” said Cecil, in 
answer to the Moor’s hospitable entreaties. “ Give me only 
license to sit in the quiet here. I am very tired.” 

“ Sit and be welcome, my son,” said Ben Arsli. “ Whom 
should this roof shelter in honor, if not thee? Musjid shall 
bring thee the supreme solace.” 

The supreme solace was a nargile, and its great bowl of rose- 
water was soon set down by the little Moorish lad at Cecil’s 
side. Whether fatigue really weighted his eyes with slumber, 
or whether the soothing sedative of the pipe had its influence, 
he had not sat long in the perfect stillness of the Moor’s shop 
before the narrow view of the street under the awning without 
was lost to him, the luster and confusion of shadowy hues 
swam a while before his eyes, the throbbing pain in his temples 
grew duller, and he slept — the heavy, dreamless sleep of in- 
tense exhaustion. 

Ben Arsli glanced at him, and bade Musjid be very quiet. 
Half an hour or more passed ; none had entered the place. The 
grave old Moslem was half slumbering himself, when there 
came a delicate odor of perfumed laces, a delicate rustle of silk 
swept the floor; a lady’s voice asked the price of an ostrich-egg, 
superbly mounted in gold. Ben Arsli opened his eyes — the 
Chasseur slept on; the newcomer was one of those great ladies 
who now and then winter in Algeria. 

Her carriage waited without; she was alone, making pur- 
chase of those innumerable splendid trifles with which Algiers 
is rife, while she drove through the town in the cooler hour 
before the sun sank into the western sea. 

The Moor rose instantly, with profound salaams, before her, 
and began to spread before her the richest treasures of his 
stock. Under plea of the light, he remained near the entrance 
with her; money was dear to him, and must not be lost, but he 
would make it, if he could, without awakening the tired soldier. 
Marvelous caskets of mother-of-pearl; carpets soft as down. 


328 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


with every brilliant hue melting one within another; coffee 
equipages, of inimitable metal work; silver statuettes, ex- 
quisitely chased and wrought; feather-fans, and screens of 
every beauty of device, were spread before her, and many of 
them were bought by her with that unerring grace of taste and 
lavishness of expenditure which were her characteristics, but 
which are far from always found in unison; and throughout 
her survey Ben Arsli had kept her near the entrance, and Cecil 
had slept on, unaroused by the low tones of their voices. 

A roll of notes had passed from her hand to the Moslem’s, 
and she was about to glide out to her carriage, when a lamp 
which hung at the farther end caught her fancy. It was very 
singular; a mingling of colored glass, silver, gold, and ivory 
being wrought in with much beauty in its formation. 

“ Is that for sale ? ” she inquired. 

As he answered in the affirmative, she moved up the shop, 
and, her eyes being lifted to the lamp, had drawn close to 
Cecil before she saw him. When she did so, she paused near 
in astonishment. 

“ Is that soldier asleep ? ” 

“ He is, madame,” softly answered the old man, in his slow, 
studied French. “He comes here to rest sometimes out of the 
noise; he was very tired to-day, and I think ill, would he have 
confessed it.” 

“ Indeed ! ” Her eyes fell on him with compassion ; he had 
fallen into an attitude of much grace and of utter exhaustion; 
his head was uncovered and rested on one arm, so that the face 
was turned upward. With a woman’s rapid, comprehensive 
glance, she saw the dark shadow, like a bruise, under his closed, 
aching eyes; she saw the weary pain upon his forehead; she 
saw the whiteness of his hands, the slenderness of his wrists, the 
softness of his hair ; she saw, as she had seen before, that what- 
ever he might be now, in some past time he had been a man 
of gentle blood, of courtly bearing. 

“ He is a Chasseur d’Afrique ? ” she asked the Moslem. 

“ Yes, madame. I think — he must have been something very 
different some day.” 

She did not answer; she stood with her thoughtful eyes gaz- 
ing on the worn-out soldier. 

“ He saved me once, madame, at much risk to himself, from 
the savagery of some Turcos,” the old man went on. “ Of 
course he is always welcome under my roof. The companion- 


THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING. 


329 


ship he has must be bitter to him, I fancy; they do say he 
would have had his officer’s grade, and the cross, too, long 
before now, if it were not for his Colonel’s hatred.” 

“ Ah ! I have seen him before now ; he carves in ivory. I sup- 
pose he has a good sale for those things with you ? ” 

The Moor looked up in amazement. 

“ In ivory, madame ? — he ? Allah-il- Allah ! I never heard 
of it. It is strange ” 

“ Very strange. Doubtless you would have given him a good 
price for them ? ” 

“ Surely I would ; any price he should have wished. Do I 
not owe him my life ? ” 

At that moment little Musjid let fall a valuable coffee-tray, 
inlaid with amber; his master, with muttered apology, hastened 
to the scene of accident; the noise startled Cecil, and his eyes 
unclosed to all the dreamy, fantastic colors of the place, and 
met those bent on him in musing pity — saw that lustrous, 
haughty, delicate head bending slightly down through the 
many-colored shadows. 

He thought he was dreaming, yet on instinct he rose, stag- 
gering slightly, for sharp pain was still darting through his 
head and temples. 

“ Madame! pardon me! Was I sleeping?” 

“ You were, and rest again. You look ill,” she said gently, 
and there was, for a moment, less of that accent in her voice, 
which the night before had marked so distinctly, so pointedly, 
the line of demarcation between a Princess of Spain and a 
soldier of Africa. 

“ I thank you ; I ail nothing.” 

He had no sense that he did, in the presence of that face 
which had the beauty of his old life; under the charm of that 
voice which had the music of his buried years. 

“I fear that is scarcely true!” she answered him. “You 
look in pain ; though as a soldier, perhaps, you will not own it ? ” 

“ A headache from the sun — no more, madame.” 

He was careful not again to forget the social gulf which 
yawned between them. 

“ That is quite bad enough! Your service must be severe?” 

“In Africa, Miladi, one cannot expect indulgence.” 

“I suppose not. You have served long?” 

“ Twelve years, madame.” 

“ And your name ? ” 


330 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ Louis Victor.” She fancied there was a slight abruptness 
in the reply, as though he were about to add some other name, 
and checked himself. 

She entered it in the little book from which she had taken 
her banknotes. 

“ I may be able to serve you,” she said, as she wrote. “ I will 
speak of you to the Marshal; and when I return to Paris, I 
may have an opportunity to bring your name before the Em- 
peror. He is as rapid as his uncle to reward military merit; 
but he has not his uncle’s opportunities for personal observa- 
tion of his soldiers.” 

The color flushed his forehead. 

“ You do me much honor,” he said rapidly, “ but if you would 
gratify me, madame, do not seek to do anything of the kind.” 

“ And why ? Do you not even desire the cross ? ” 

“ I desire nothing, except to be forgotten.” 

“You seek what others dread then?” 

“ It may be so. At any rate, if you would serve me, madame, 
never say what can bring me into notice.” 

She regarded him with much surprise, with some slight sense 
of annoyance; she had bent far in tendering her influence at 
the French court to a private soldier, and his rejection of it 
seemed as ungracious as it was inexplicable. 

At that moment the Moor joined them. 

“ Miladi has told me, M. Victor, that you are a first-rate 
carver of ivories. How is it you have never let me benefit by 
your art ? ” 

“ My things are not worth a sou,” muttered Cecil hurriedly. 

“ You do them great injustice, and yourself also,” said the 
grande dame, more coldly than she had before spoken. “ Your 
carvings are singularly perfect, and should bring you consid- 
erable returns.” 

“ Why have you never shown them to me at least ? ” pursued 
Ben Arsli — “ why not have given me my option ? ” 

The blood flushed Cecil’s face again ; he turned to the 
Princess. 

“ I withheld them, madame, not because he would have under- 
priced, but overpriced them. He rates a trifling act of mine, 
of long ago, so unduly.” 

She bent her head in silence; yet a more grateful compre- 
hension of his motive she could not have given than her srlance 
alone gave. 


THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING. 331 

Ben Arsli stroked his great beard ; more moved than his Mos- 
lem dignity would show. 

“ Always so ! ” he muttered, “ always so ! My son, in some 
life before this, was not generosity your ruin ? ” 

“ Miladi was about to purchase that lamp ? ” asked Cecil, 
avoiding the question. “ Her Highness will not find anything 
like it in all Algiers.” 

The lamp was taken down, and the conversation turned from 
himself. 

“ May I bear it to your carriage, madame ? ” he asked, as 
she moved to leave, having made it her own, while her footman 
carried out the smaller articles she had bought to the equipage. 
She bowed in silence ; she was very exclusive, she was not wholly 
satisfied with herself for having conversed thus with a Chas- 
seur d’Afrique in a Moor’s bazaar. Still, she vaguely felt 
pity for this man ; she equally vaguely desired to serve 
him. 

“Wait, M. Victor!” she said, as he closed the door of her 
carriage. “ I accepted your chessmen last night, but you are 
very certain that it is impossible I can retain them on such 
terms.” 

A shadow darkened his face. 

“ Let your dogs break them then, madame. They shall not 
come back to me.” 

“ You mistake — I did not mean that I would send them back. 
I simply desire to offer you some equivalent for them. There 
must be something that you wish for ? — something which would 
be acceptable to you in the life you lead ? ” 

“ I have already named the only thing I desire.” 

He had been solicitous to remember and sustain the enor- 
mous difference in their social degrees; but at the offer of her 
gifts, of her patronage, of her recompense, the pride of his old 
life rose up to meet her own. 

“ To be forgotten? A sad wish! Hay, surely life in a regi- 
ment of Africa cannot be so cloudless that it can create in you 
no other ? ” 

“It is not. I have another.” 

“Then tell it to me; it shall be gratified.” 

“ It is to enjoy a luxury long ago lost forever. It is — to be 
allowed to give the slight courtesy of a gentleman without being 
tendered the wage of a servant.” 

She understood him; she was moved, too, by the inflexion 


332 UNDER TWO FLAGS. 

of his voice. She was not so cold, not so negligent, as the world 
called her. 

“ I had passed my word to grant it ; I cannot retract,” she 
answered him, after a pause. “ I will press nothing more on 
you. But — as an obligation to me — can you find no way in 
which a rouleau of gold would benefit your men ? ” 

“No way that I can take it for them. But, if you care in- 
deed to do them a charity, a little wine, a little fruit, a few 
flowers (for there are those among them who love flowers), sent 
to the hospital, will bring many benedictions on your name, 
madame. They lie in infinite misery there ! ” 

“ I will remember,” she said simply, while a thoughtful sad- 
ness passed over her brilliant face. “ Adieu, M. le Caporal ; and 
if you should think better of your choice, and will allow your 
name to be mentioned by me to his Majesty, send me word 
through my people. There is my card.” 

The carriage whirled away down the crooked street. He 
stood under the tawny awning of the Moorish house, with the 
thin, glazed card in his hand. On it was printed: 

“Mme. la Princesse Corona d’Amagiie, 

“ Hotel Corona, Paris.” 

In the corner was written, “ Villa Aiaussa, Algiers.” He 
thrust it in the folds of his sash, and turned within. 

“ Do you know her ? ” he asked Ben Arsli. 

The old man shook his head. 

“ She is the most beautiful of thy many fair Frankish women. 
I never saw her till to-day. She seemed to have an interest in 
thee, my son. But listen here. Touching these ivory toys — 
if thou dost not bring henceforth to me all the work in them 
that thou doest, thou shalt never come here more to meet the 
light of her eyes.” 

Cecil smiled and pressed the Moslem’s hand. 

“ I kept them away because you would have given me a hun- 
dred piasters for what had not been worth one. As for her eyes, 
they are stars that shine on another world than an African 
trooper’s. So best ! ” 

Yet they were stars of which he thought more, as he wended 
his way back to the barracks, than of the splendid constella- 
tions of the Algerian evening that shone with all the luster of 
the day, but with a soft, enchanted light which transfigured sea. 


THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING. 333 

and earth, and sky as never did the day’s full glow, as he re- 
turned to the mechanical duties, to the thankless services, to 
the distasteful meal, to the riotous mirth, to the coarse com- 
radeship, which seemed to him to-night more bitter than they 
had ever done since his very identity, his very existence, had 
been killed and buried past recall, past resurrection, under the 
kepi d’ordonnance of a Chasseur d’Afrique. 

Meanwhile, the Princess Corona drove homeward — homeward 
to where a temporary home had been made by her in the most 
elegant of the many snow-white villas that stud the sides of 
the Sahel and face the bright bow of the sunlit bay; a villa 
with balconies, and awnings, and cool, silent chambers, and 
rich, glowing gardens, and a broad, low roof, half hidden 
in bay and orange and myrtle and basilica, and the liquid 
sound of waters bubbling beneath a riotous luxuriance of 
blossom. 

Mme. la Frincesse passed from her carriage to her own morn- 
ing room and sank down on a couch, a little listless and weary 
with her search among the treasures of the Algerine bazaa s. 
It was purposeless work, after all. Had she not bronzes, and 
porcelains, and bric-a-brac, and objets d’art in profusion in her 
Roman villa, her Parisian hotel, her great, grim palace in 
Estremadura. 

“ Hot one of those things do I want — not one shall I look at 
twice. The money would have been better at the soldiers’ 
hospital,” she thought, while her eyes dwelt on a chess-table near 
her — a table on which the mimic hosts of Chasseurs and Arabs 
were ranged in opposite squadrons. 

She took the White King in her hand and gazed at it with 
a certain interest. 

“ That man has been noble once,” she thought. “ What a 
fate — what a cruel fate ! ” 

It touched her to great pity; although proud with too in- 
tense a pride, her nature was exceedingly generous, and, when 
once moved, deeply compassionate. The unerring glance of a 
woman habituated to the first society of Europe had told her 
that the accent, the bearing, the tone, the features of this 
soldier, who only asked of life “oblivion,” were those of one 
originally of gentle blood; and the dignity and patience of his 
acceptance of the indignities which his present rank entailed 
on him had not escaped her any more than the dfelicate beauty 


334 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


of his face as she had seen it, weary, pale, and shadowed with 
pain, in the unconscious revelation of sleep. 

“ How bitter his life must be ! ” she mused. “ When Philip 
comes, perhaps he will show some way to aid him. And yet — 
who can serve a man who only desires to be forgotten ? ” 

Then, with a certain impatient sense of some absurd dis- 
crepancy, of some unseemly occupation, in her thus dwelling 
on the wishes and the burdens of a sous-officier of Light Cav- 
alry, she laughed a little, and put the White Chief back once 
more in his place. Yet even as she set the king among his 
mimic forces, the very carvings themselves served to retain their 
artist in her memory. 

There was about them an indescribable elegance, an exceed- 
ing grace and beauty, which spoke of a knowledge of art and 
of refinement of taste far beyond those of a mere military 
amateur in the one who had produced them. 

“ What could bring a man of that talent, with that address, 
into the ranks ? ” she mused. “ Persons of good family, of once 
fine position, come here, they say, and live and die unrecognized 
under the Imperial flag. It is usually some dishonor that drives 
them out of their own worlds; it may be so with him. Yet he 
does not look like one whom shame has touched; he is proud 
still — prouder than he knows. More likely it is the old, old 
story — a high name and a narrow fortune — the ruin of thou- 
sands! He is French, I suppose; a French aristocrat who has 
played au roi depouille, most probably, and buried himself and 
his history forever beneath those two names that tell one noth- 
ing — Louis Victor. Well, it is no matter of mine. Very possi- 
bly he is a mere adventurer with a good manner. This army 
here is a pot-pourri, they say, of all the varied scoundrelisms 
of Europe ! ” 

She left the chess-table and went onward to the dressing and 
bath and bed chambers, which opened in one suite from her 
boudoir, and resigned herself to the hands of her attendants for 
her dinner toilet. 

The Moslem had said aright of her beauty; and now, as her 
splendid hair was unloosened and gathered up afresh with a 
crescent-shaped comb of gold that was not brighter than the 
tresses themselves, the brilliant, haughty, thoughtful face was 
of a truth, as he had said, the fairest that had ever come from 
the Frankish shores to the hot African sea-board. Many be- 
side the old Moslem had thought it “ the fairest that e’er the 


THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING. 


335 


sun shone on,” and held one grave, lustrous glance of the blue 
imperial eyes above aught else on earth. Many had loved her — 
all without return. Yet, although only twenty years had passed 
over her proud head, the Princess Corona d’Amagiie had’ been 
wedded and been widowed. 

Wedded, with no other sentiment than that of a certain pity 
and a certain honor for the man whose noble Spanish name 
she took. Widowed, by a death that was the seal of her 
marriage sacrament, and left her his wife only in name and 
law. 

The marriage had left no chain upon her; it had only made 
her mistress of wide wealth, of that villa on the Sicilian Sea, 
of that light, spacious palace-dwelling in Paris that bore her 
name, of that vast majestic old castle throned on brown Estre- 
maduran crags, and looking down on mighty woods of cork and 
chestnut, and flashing streams of falling water hurling through 
the gorges. The death had left no regret upon her; it only 
gave her for a while a graver shadow over the brilliancy of her 
youth and of her beauty, and gave her for always — or for so 
long, at least, as she so chose to use it — a plea for that indiffer- 
ence to men’s worship of her which their sex called heartless- 
ness; which her own sex thought an ultra-refined coquetry; 
and which was, in real truth, neither the one nor the other, 
but simply the negligence of a woman very difficult to touch, 
and, as it had seemed, impossible to charm. 

None knew quite aright the history of that marriage. Some 
were wont to whisper “ ambition ” ; and, when that whisper 
came round to her, her splendid lips would curl with as splendid 
a scorn. 

“ Do they not know that scarce any marriage can mate us 
equally ? ” she would ask ; for she came of a great Line that 
thought few royal branches on equality with it; and she cher- 
ished as things of strictest creed the legends that gave her race, 
with its amber hair and its eyes of sapphire blue, the blood of 
Arthur in their veins. 

Of a surety it was not ambition that had allied her, on his 
death-bed, with Beltran Corona d’Amagiie; but what it was 
the world could never tell precisely. The world would not have 
believed it if it had heard the truth — the truth that it had been, 
in a different fashion, a gleam of something of the same com- 
passion that now made her merciful to a common trooper of 
Africa which had wedded her to the dead Spanish Prince — 


336 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


compassion which, with many another rich and generous thing, 
lay beneath her coldness and her pride as the golden stamen 
lies folded within the white, virginal, chill cup of the lily. 

She had never felt a touch of even passing preference to any 
one out of the many who had sought her high-born beauty; 
she was too proud to be easily moved to such selection, and she 
was far too habituated to homage to be wrought upon by it, 
ever so slightly. She was of a noble, sun-lit, gracious nature; 
she had been always happy, always obeyed, always caressed, 
always adored ; it had rendered her immeasurably contemptuous 
of flattery; it had rendered her a little contemptuous of pain. 
She had never had aught to regret; it was not possible that 
she could realize what regret was. 

Hence men called and found her very cold; yet those of her 
own kin whom she loved knew that the heart of a summer 
rose was not warmer, nor sweeter, nor richer than hers. And 
first among these was her brother — at once her guardian and 
her slave — who thought her perfect, and would no more have 
crossed her will than he would have set his foot on her beauti- 
ful, imperial head. Corona d’Amagiie had been his friend ; the 
only one for whom he had ever sought to break her unvarying 
indifference to her lovers, but for whom even he had pleaded 
vainly until one autumn season, when they had stayed together 
at a great archducal castle in South Austria. In one of the 
forest-glades, awaiting the fanfare of the hunt, she rejected, for 
the third time, the passionate supplication of the superb noble 
who ranked with the D’Ossuna and the Medina-Sidonia. He 
rode from her in great bitterness, in grief that no way moved 
her — she was importuned with these entreaties to weariness. 
An hour after he was brought past her, wounded and senseless ; 
he had saved her brother from imminent death at his own 
cost, and the tusks of the mighty Styrian boar had plunged 
through and through his frame, as they had met in the narrow 
woodland glade. 

“ He will be a cripple — a paralyzed cripple — for life ! ” said 
the one whose life had been saved by his devotion to her that 
night; and his lips shook a little under his golden beard as he 
spoke. 

She looked at him; she loved him well, and no homage to 
herself could have moved her as this sacrifice for him had done. 

“You think he will live?” she asked. 

“ They say it is sure. He may live on to old age. But how ? 


THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING. 337 

My God! what a death in life! And all for my sake, in my 
stead ! ” 

She was silent several moments; then she raised her face, 
a little paler than it had been, but with a passionless resolve 
set on it. 

“ Philip, we do not leave our debts unpaid. Go ; tell him I 
will be his wife.” 

“ His wife — now ! Venetia ” 

“ Go ! ” she said briefly. “ Tell him what I say.” 

“ But what a sacrifice ! In your beauty, your youth ” 

“ He did not count cost. Are we less generous ? Go — tell 
him.” 

He was told; and was repaid. Such a light of unutterable 
joy burned through the misty agony of his eyes as never, it 
seemed to those who saw, had beamed before in mortal eyes. 
He did not once hesitate at the acceptance of her self-surrender ; 
he only pleaded that the marriage ceremony should pass between 
them that night. 

There were notaries and many priests in the great ducal 
household; all was done as he desired. She consented without 
wavering; she had passed her word, she would not have with- 
drawn it if it had been a thousand times more bitter in its 
fulfillment. The honor of her house was dearer to her than any 
individual happiness. This man for them had lost peace, 
health, joy, strength, every hope of life; to dedicate her own 
life to him, as he had vainly prayed her when in the full glow 
and vigor of his manhood, was the only means by which their 
vast debt to him could be paid. To so pay it was the instant 
choice of her high code of honor, and of her generosity that 
would not be outrun. Moreover, she pitied him unspeakably, 
though her heart had no tenderness for him ; she had dismissed 
him with cold disdain, and he had gone from her to save the 
only life she loved, and was stretched a stricken, broken, help- 
less wreck, with endless years of pain and weariness before 
him ! 

At midnight, in the great, dim magnificence of the state 
chamber where he lay, and with the low, soft chanting of the 
chapel choir from afar echoing through the incensed air, she 
bent her haughty head down over his couch, and the marriage 
benediction was spoken over them. 

His voice was faint and broken, but it had the thrill of a 
passionate triumph in it. When the last words were uttered, he 


338 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


lay a while, exhausted, silent; only looking ever upward at her 
with his dark, dreamy eyes, in which the old love glanced so 
strangely through the blindness of pain. Then he smiled as 
the last echo of the choral melodies died softly on the silence. 

“That is joy enough! Ah! have no fear. With the dawn 
you will be free once more. Did you think that I could have 
taken your sacrifice ? I knew well, let them say as they would, 
that I should not live the night through. But, lest existence 
should linger to curse me, to chain you, I rent the linen bands 
off my wounds an hour ago. All their science will not put back 
the life now ! My limbs are dead, and the cold steals up ! Ah, 
love! ah, love! You never thought how men can suffer! But 
have no grief for me. I am happy. Bend your head down, and 
lay your lips on mine once. You are my own ! — death is sweeter 
than life ! ” 

And before sunrise he died. 

Some shadow from that fatal and tragic midnight marriage 
rested on her still. Though she was blameless, some vague 
remorse ever haunted her; though she had been so wholly guilt- 
less of it, this death for her sake ever seemed in some sort .of 
her bringing. Men thought her only colder, only prouder; but 
they erred. She was one of those women who, beneath the 
courtly negligence of a chill manner, are capable of infinite 
tenderness, infinite nobility, and infinite self-reproach. 

A great French painter once, in Rome, looking on her from 
a distance, shaded his eyes with his hand, as if her beauty, 
like the sun, dazzled him. “ Exquisite — superb ! ” he muttered ; 
and he was a man whose own ideals were so matchless that liv- 
ing women rarely could wring out his praise. “ She is nearly 
perfect, your Princess Corona ! ” 

“ Nearly ! ” cried a Roman sculptor. “ What, in Heaven’s 
name, can she want ? 99 

“ Only one thing ! 99 

“ And that is ” 

“ To have loved.” 

Wherewith he turned into the Greco. 

He had found the one flaw — and it was still there. What 
he missed in her was still wanting. 


CHAPTER XXIII. 


THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE. 

“ V’la ce que c’est la gloire — au grabat ! ” 

The contemptuous sentence was crushed through Cigarette’s 
tight-pressed, bright-red lips, with an irony sadder than tears. 
She was sitting on the edge of a grabat, hard as wood, comfort- 
less as a truss of straw, and looking down the long hospital 
room, with its endless rows of beds and its hot sun shining 
blindingly on its glaring, whitewashed walls. 

She was well known and well loved there. When her little 
brilliant-hued figure fluttered, like some scarlet bird of Africa, 
down the dreary length of those chambers of misery, bloodless 
lips, close-clinched in torture, would stir with a smile, would 
move with a word of welcome. Xo tender-voiced, dove-eyed 
Sister of Orders of Mercy, gliding gray and soft, and like a 
living psalm of consolation, beside those couches of misery, 
bore with them the infinite, inexpressible charm that the Friend 
of the Flag brought to the sufferers. The Sisters were good, 
were gentle, were valued as they merited by the greatest black- 
guard prostrate there; but they never smiled, they never took 
the dying heart of a man back with one glance to the days of 
his childhood, they never gave a sweet, wild snatch of song 
like a bird’s on a spring-blossoming bough that thrilled through 
half-dead senses, with a thousand voices from a thousand buried 
hours. “ But the Little One,” as said a gaunt, gray-bearded 
Zephyr once, where he lay with the death-chill stealing slowly 
up his jagged, torn frame — “the Little One — do you see — she 
is youth, she is life ; she is all we have lost. That is her charm ! 
The Sisters are good women, they are very good ; but they only 
pity us. The Little One, she loves us. That is the difference; 
do you see ? ” 

It was all the difference — a wide difference; she loved them 
all, with the warmth and fire of her young heart, for the sake of 
France and of their common Flag. And though she was but 
a wild, wayward, mischievous gamin, — a gamin all over, though 
in a girl’s form, — men would tell in camp and hospital, with 


340 


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great tears coursing down their brown, scarred cheeks, how her 
touch would lie softly as a snowflake on their heated foreheads ; 
how her watch would be kept by them through long nights of 
torment; how her gifts of golden trinkets would be sold or 
pawned as soon as received to buy them ice or wine; and how 
in their delirium the sweet, fresh voice of the child of the regi- 
ment would soothe them, singing above their wretched beds 
some carol or chant of their own native province, which it al- 
ways seemed she must know by magic; for, were it Basque or 
Breton, were it a sea-lay of Vendee or a mountain-song of the 
Orientales, were it a mere, ringing rhyme for the mules of 
Alsace, or a wild, bold romanesque from the country of Berri — 
Cigarette knew each and all, and never erred by any chance, but 
ever sung to every soldier the rhythm familiar from his infancy, 
the melody of his mother’s cradle-song and of his first love’s lips. 
And there had been times when those songs, suddenly break- 
ing through the darkness of night, suddenly lulling the fiery 
anguish of wounds, had made the men who one hour before had 
been like mad dogs, like goaded tigers — men full of the lusts of 
slaughter and the lust of the senses, and chained powerless and 
blaspheming tp a bed of agony — tremble and shudder at them- 
selves, and turn their faces to the wall and weep like children, 
and fall asleep, at length, with wondering dreams of God. 

“ V’la ce que c’est la gloire — au grabat ! ” said Cigarette, now 
grinding her pretty teeth. She was in her most revolu- 
tionary and reckless mood, drumming the rataplan with her 
spurred heels, and sitting smoking on the corner of old Miou- 
Matou’s mattress. Miou-Matou, who had acquired that title 
among the joyeux for his scientific powers of making a tomcat 
into a stew so divine that you could not tell it from rabbit, 
being laid up with a ball in his hip, a spear-head between his 
shoulders, a rib or so broken, and one or two other little trifling 
casualties. 

Miou-Matou, who looked very like an old grizzly bear, laughed 
in the depths of his great, hairy chest. “ Dream of glory, and 
end on a grabat! Just so, just so. And yet one has pleasures 
— to sweep off an Arbico’s neck nice and clean — swish ! ” and 
he described a circle with his lean, brawny arm with as infinite 
a relish as a dilettante, grown blind, would listen thirstily to 
the description of an exquisite bit of Faience or Della Quercia 
work. 

“ Pleasures ! My God ! Infinite, endless misery ! ” murmured 


THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE. 


341 


a man on her right hand. He was not thirty years of age; 
with a delicate, dark, beautiful head that might have passed 
as model to a painter for a St. John. He was dying fast of 
the most terible form of pulmonary maladies. 

Cigarette flashed her bright, falcon glance over him. 

“ Well! is it not misery that is glory? ” 

“We think that it is when we are children. God help us!” 
murmured the man who lay dying of lung-disease. 

“ Ouf ! Then we think rightly ! Glory ! Is it the cross, the 
star, the baton? Ho!* He who wins those runs his horse up 
on a hill, out of shot range, and watches through his glass how 
his troops surge up, wave on wave, in the great sea of blood. 
It is misery that is glory — the misery that toils with bleeding 
feet under burning suns without complaint; that lies half-dead 
through the long night with but one care — to keep the torn flag 
free from the conqueror’s touch; that bears the rain of blows 
in punishment, rather than break silence and buy release by 
betrayal of a comrade’s trust; that is beaten like the mule, and 
galled like the horse, and starved like the camel, and housed 
like the dog, and yet does the thing which is right, and the 
thing which is brave, despite all ; that suffers, and endures, and 
pours out his blood like water to the thirsty sands, whose thirst 
is never stilled, and goes up in the morning sun to the combat, 
as though death were paradise that the Arbicos dream ; knowing 
the while, that no paradise waits save the crash of the hoof 
through the throbbing brain, or the roll of the gun-carriage 
over the writhing limb. That is glory. The misery that is 
heroism because France needs it, because a soldier’s honor wills 
it. That is glory. It is here to-day in the hospital as it never 
is in the Cour des Princes, where the glittering host of the 
marshals gather ! ” 

Her voice rang clear as a clarion; the warm blood burned in 
her bright cheeks; the swift, fiery, pathetic eloquence of her 
nation moved her, and moved strangely the hearts of her 
hearers; for though she could neither read nor write, there was 


* Having received ardent reproaches from field officers and commanders of 
divisions for the injustice done their services by this sentence, I beg to assure 
them that the sentiment is Cigarette’s— not mine. I should be very sorry for 
an instant to seem to depreciate that “genius of command ” without whose 
guidance an army is but a rabble, or to underrate that noblest courage which 
accepts the burden of arduous responsibilities and of duties as bitter in anxiety 
as they are precious in honor. 


342 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


in Cigarette the germ of that power which the world mistily 
calls genius. 

There were men lying in that sick-chamber brutalized, crime- 
stained, ignorant as the bullocks of the plains, and, like them, 
reared and driven for the slaughter; yet there was not one 
among them to whom some ray of light failed to come from 
those words, through whom some thrill failed to pass as they 
heard them. Out yonder in the free air, in the barrack court, 
or on the plains, the Little One would rate them furiously, mock 
them mercilessly, rally them with the flat of a saber, if they were 
mutinous, and lash them with the most pitiless ironies if they 
were grumbling; but here, in the hospital, the Little One loved 
them, and they knew it, and that love gave a flute-like music 
to the passion of her voice. 

Then she laughed, and drummed the rataplan again with her 
brass heel. 

“All the same, one is not in paradise au grabat; eh, Pere 
Matou ? ” she said curtly. She was half impatient of her own 
momentary lapse into enthusiasm, and she knew the temper of 
her “ children ” as accurately as a bugler knows the notes of the 
reveille — knew that they loved to laugh even with the death- 
rattle in their throats, and with their hearts half breaking over 
a comrade’s corpse, would cry in burlesque mirth, “ Ah, le bon 
zig ! II a avale sa cartouche ! ” * 

“ Paradise ! ” growled Pere Matou. “ Ouf ! Who wants that ? 
If one had a few bidons of brandy, now ” 

“ Brandy? Oh, he. You are to be much more of aristocrats 
now than that ! ” cried Cigarette, with an immeasurable satire 
curling on her rosy, piquant lips. “ The Silver Pheasants have 
taken to patronize you. Ma cantche! if I were you, I would 
not touch a glass, nor eat a fig; you will not, if you have the 
spirit of a rabbit. You! Fed like dogs with the leavings of 
her table — pardieu! that is not for soldiers of France! ” 

“ Eh ? What dost thou say ? ” growled Miou-Matou, peering 
up under his gray, shaggy brows. 

“ Only that a grande dame has sent you champagne. That 
is all. Sapristi ! how easy it is to play the saint and Samaritan 
with two words to one’s maitre d’hotel, and a rouleau of gold 
that one never misses! The rich they can buy all things, you 
see, even heaven, so cheap ! ” With which withering satire 
Cigarette left Pere Matou in the conviction that he must be 
. * “ Ah, the good fellow ! He’s swallowed his own cartouche ! ” 


THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE. 


343 


already dead and among the angels if the people began to talk 
of champagne to him ; and flitting down between the long rows 
of beds with the old disabled veterans who tended them, 
skimmed her way, like a bird as she was, into another great 
chamber, filled, like the first, with suffering in all stages and at 
all years, from the boy-conscript, tossing in African fever, to 
the white-haired campaigner of a hundred wounds. 

Cigarette was as caustic as a Voltaire this morning. Com- 
ing through the entrance of the hospital, she had casually 
heard that Mme. la Princesse Corona d’Amagiie had made a 
gift of singular munificence and mercy to the invalid soldiers 
— a gift of wine, of fruit, of flowers, that would brighten their 
long, dreary hours for many weeks. Who Mme. la Princesse 
might be she knew nothing; but the title was enough; she was 
a silver pheasant — bah ! And Cigarette hated the aristocrats — 
when they were of the sex feminine. “ An aristocrat in ad- 
versity is an eagle,” she would say, “ but an aristocrat in pros- 
perity is a peacock.” Which was the reason why she flouted 
glittering young nobles with all the insolence imaginable, but 
took the part of “ Marquise,” of “ Bel-a-faire-peur,” and of such 
wanderers like them, who had buried their sixteen quarterings 
under the black shield of the Battalion of Africa. With a word 
here and a touch there, — tender, soft, and bright, — since, how- 
ever ironic her mood, she never brought anything except sun- 
shine to those who lay in such sore need of it, beholding the 
sun in the heavens only through the narrow chink of a hospital 
window; at last she reached the bed she came most specially to 
visit — a bed on which was stretched the emaciated form of a 
man once beautiful as a Greek dream of a god. 

The dews of a great agony stood on his forehead; his teeth 
were tight clinched on lips white and parched; and his im- 
mense eyes, with the heavy circles round them, were fastened 
on vacancy with the yearning misery that gleams in the eyes 
of a Spanish bull when it is struck again and again by the 
matador, and yet cannot die. 

She bent over him softly. 

“ Tiens, M. Leon ! I have brought you some ice.” 

His weary eyes turned on her gratefully; he sought to speak, 
but the effort brought the spasm on his lungs afresh; it shook 
him with horrible violence from head to foot, and the foam 
on his auburn beard was red with blood. 

There was no one by to watch him; he was sure to die; a 


344 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


week sooner or later — what mattered it? He was useless as a 
soldier; good only to be thrown into a pit, with some quicklime 
to hasten destruction and do the work of the slower earthworms. 

Cigarette said not a word, but she took out of some vine- 
leaves a cold, hard lump of ice, and held it to him ; the delicious 
coolness and freshness in that parching, noontide heat stilled 
the convulsion ; his eyes thanked her, though his lips could not ; 
he lay panting, exhausted, but relieved; and she — thoughtfully 
for her — slid herself down on the floor, and began singing low 
and sweetly, as a fairy might sing on the raft of a water-lily 
leaf. She sung quadriales, to be sure, Beranger’s songs and odes 
of the camp ; for she knew of no hymn but the “ Marseillaise,” 
and her chants were all chants like the “ Laus Veneris.” But 
the voice that gave them was pure as the voice of a thrush in 
the spring, and the cadence of its music was so silvery sweet 
that it soothed like a spell all the fever-racked brains, all the 
pain-tortured spirits. 

“ Ah ! that is sweet,” murmured the dying man. “ It is like 
the brooks — like the birds — like the winds 'in the leaves.” 

He was but half conscious; but the lulling of that gliding 
voice brought him peace. And Cigarette sung on, only mov- 
ing to reach him some fresh touch of ice, while time traveled 
on, and the first afternoon shadows crept across the bare floor. 
Every now and then, dimly through the openings of the win- 
dows, came a distant roll of drums, a burst of military music, 
an echo of the laughter of a crowd; and then her head went up 
eagerly, an impatient shade swept across her expressive face. 

It was a fete-day in Algiers; there were flags and banners 
fluttering from the houses; there were Arab races and Arab 
maneuvers; there was a review of troops for some foreign gen- 
eral; there were all the mirth and the mischief that she loved, 
and that never went on without her ; and she knew well enough 
that from mouth to mouth there was sure to be asking, “ Mais 
ou done est Cigarette ? ” Cigarette, who was the Generalissima 
of Africa! 

But still she never moved; though all her vivacious life was 
longing to be out and in their midst, on the back of a desert 
horse, on the head of a huge drum, perched on the iron support 
of a high-hung lantern, standing on a cannon while the Horse 
Artillery swept full gallop, firing down a volley of argot on the 
hot homage of a hundred lovers, drinking creamy liqueurs and 
filling her pockets with bonbons from handsome subalterns and 



Photo by Sarony 











THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE. 


345 


aids-de-camp, doing as she had done ever since she could re- 
member her first rataplan. But she never moved. She knew 
that in the general gala these sick-beds would be left more de- 
serted and less soothed than ever. She knew, too, that it was for 
the sake of this man, lying dying here from the lunge of a 
Bedouin lance through his lungs, that the ivory wreaths and 
crosses and statuettes had been sold. 

And Cigarette had done more than this ere now many a time 
for her “ children.” 

The day stole on; Leon Bamon lay very quiet; the ice for 
his chest and the song for his ear gave him that semi-oblivion, 
dreamy and comparatively painless, which was the only mercy 
which could come to him. All the chamber was unusually still ; 
on three of the beds the sheet had been drawn over the face of 
the sleepers, who had sunk to a last sleep since the morning 
rose. The shadows lengthened, the hours followed one another; 
Cigarette sang on to herself with few pauses ; whenever she did 
so pause to lay soaked linen on the soldier’s hot forehead, or to 
tend him gently in those paroxysms that wrenched the clotted 
blood from off his lungs, there was a light on her face that did 
not come from the golden heat of the African sun. 

Such a light those who know well the Children of France 
may have seen, in battle or in insurrection, grow beautiful upon 
the young face of a conscript or a boy-insurgent as he lifted a 
dying comrade, or pushed to the front to be slain in another’s 
stead; the face that a moment before had been keen for the 
slaughter as the eyes of a kite, and recklessly gay as the saucy 
refrain the lips caroled. 

A step sounded on the bare boards; she looked up; and the 
wounded man raised his weary lids with a gleam of gladness 
under them; Cecil bent above his couch. 

“ Dear Leon ! how is it with you ? ” 

His voice was softened to infinite tenderness; Leon Ramon 
had been for many a year his comrade and his friend ; an artist 
of Paris, a man of marvelous genius, of high idealic creeds, who, 
in a fatal moment of rash despair, had flung his talents, his 
broken fortunes, his pure and noble spirit, into the fiery furnace 
of the hell of military Africa ; and now lay dying here, a com- 
mon soldier, forgotten as though he were already in his 
grave. 

“ The review is just over. I got ten minutes to spare, and 
came to you the instant I could,” pursued Cecil. “ See here 


346 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


what I bring you! You, with your artist’s soul, will feel your- 
self all but well when you look on these ! ” 

He spoke with a hopefulness he could never feel, for he knew 
that the life of Leon Ramon was doomed; and as the other 
strove to gain breath enough to answer him, he gently mo- 
tioned him to silence, and placed on his bed some peaches 
bedded deep in moss and circled round with stephanotis, with 
magnolia, with roses, with other rarer flowers still. 

The face of the artist-soldier lightened with a longing joy; 
his lips quivered. 

“ Ah, God! they have the fragrance of my France! ” 

Cecil said nothing, but moved them nearer in to the clasp of 
his eager hands. Cigarette he did not see. 

There were some moments of silence, while the dark eyes 
of the dying man thirstily dwelt on the beauty of the flowers, 
and his dry, ashen lips seemed to drink in their perfumes as 
those athirst drink in water. 

“ They are beautiful,” he said faintly, at length. “ They have 
our youth in them. How came you by theiii, dear friend ? ” 

“ They are not due to me,” answered Cecil hurriedly. “ Mme. 
la Princesse Corona sends them to you. She has sent great 
gifts to the hospital — wines, fruits, a profusion of flowers, such 
as those. Through her, these miserable chambers will bloom 
for a while like a garden; and the best wines of Europe will 
slake your thirst in lieu of that miserable tisane.” 

“ It is very kind,” murmured Leon Ramon languidly ; life was 
too feeble in him to leave him vivid pleasures in aught. “ But 
I am ungrateful. La Cigarette here — she has been so good, 
so tender, so pitiful. For once I have almost not missed you! ” 
Cigarette, thus alluded to, sprang to her feet with her head 
tossed back, and all her cynicism back again; a hot color was 
on her cheeks, the light had passed from her face, she struck 
her white teeth together. She had thought “ Bel-a-faire-peur ” 
chained to his regiment in the field of maneuver, or she would 
never have come thither to tend his friend. She had felt happy 
in her self-sacrifice; she had grown into a gentle, pensive, merci- 
ful mood, singing here by the side of the dying soldier, and 
now the first thing she heard was of the charities of Mme. la 
Princesse ! 

That was all her reward ! Cigarette received the recompense 
that usually comes to generous natures which have strung them- 
selves to some self-surrender that costs them dear. 


THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE. 


347 


Cecil looked at her surprised, and smiled. 

“ Ma belle, is it you ? That is, indeed, good. You were the 
good angel of my life the other night, and to-day come to bring 
consolation to my friend ” 

“ Good angel ! Chut, M. Victor ! One does not know those 
mots sucres in Algiers. There is nothing of the angel about 
me, I hope. Your friend, too ! Prut-tut! Do you think I have 
never been used to taking care of my comrades in hospital be- 
fore you played the sick-nurse here ? ” 

She spoke with all her brusque petulance in arms again; 
she hated that he should imagine she had sacrificed her fete- 
day to Leon Ramon, because the artist-trooper was dear to him ; 
she hated him to suppose that she had waited there all the 
hours through on the chance that he would find her at her post, 
and admire her for her charity. Cigarette was far too proud 
and disdainful a young soldier to seek either his presence or his 
praise. 

He smiled again; he did not understand the caprices of her 
changeful moods, and he did not feel that interest in her 
which would have made him divine the threads of their 
vagaries. 

“ I did not think to offend you, my little one,” he said gently. 
“ I meant only to thank you for your goodness to Ramon in my 
absence.” 

Cigarette shrugged her shoulders. 

“ There was no goodness, and there need be no thanks. Ask 
Pere Matou how often I have. sat with him hours through.” 

“ But on a fete-day ! And you who love pleasure, and grace 
it so well ” 

“ Ouf ! I have had so much of it,” said the little one con- 
temptuously. “ It is so tame to me. Clouds of dust, scurry 
of horses, fanfare of trumpets, thunder of drums, and all for 
nothing! Bah! I have been in a dozen battles — I — and I am 
not likely to care much for a sham fight.” 

“Hay, she is unjust to herself,” murmured Leon Ramon. 
“ She gave up the fete to do this mercy — it has been a great 
one. She is more generous than she will ever allow. Here, 
Cigarette, look at these scarlet rosebuds; they are like your 
bright cheeks. Will you have them? I have nothing else to 
give.” 

“ Rosebuds ! ” echoed Cigarette, with supreme scorn. “ Rose- 
buds for me? I know no rose but the red of the tricolor; and 


348 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


I could not tell a weed from a flower. Besides, I told Miou- 
Matou just now, if my children do as I tell them, they will not 
take a leaf or a peach-stone from this grande dame — how does 
she call herself ? — Mme. Corona d’Amagiie ! ” 

Cecil looked up quickly : “ Why not ? ” 

Cigarette flashed on him her brilliant, brown eyes with a fire 
that amazed him. 

“ Because we are soldiers, not paupers ! ” 

“ Surely ; but ” 

“ And it is not for the silver pheasants, who have done noth- 
ing to deserve their life but lain in nests of cotton wool, and 
eaten grain that others sow and shell for them, and spread their 
shining plumage in a sun that never clouds above their heads, to 
insult, with the insolence of their ‘ pity ’ and their ‘ charity/ 
the heroes of France, who perish as they have lived, for their 
Country and their Flag ! ” 

It was a superb peroration ! If the hapless flowers lying there 
had been a cartel of outrage to the concrete majesty of the 
French Army, the Army’s champion could not have spoken with 
more impassioned force and scorn. 

Cecil laughed slightly; but he answered, with a certain an- 
noyance : 

“ There is no ‘ insolence ’ here ; no question of it. Mme. la 
Princesse desired to offer some gift to the soldiers of Algiers; 
I suggested to her that to increase the scant comforts of the 
hospital, and gladden the weary eyes of sick men with beauties 
that the Executive never dreams of bestowing, would be the 
most merciful and acceptable mode of exercising her kindness. 
If blame there be in the matter, it is mine.” 

In defending the generosity of what he knew to be a genuine 
and sincere wish to gratify his comrades, he betrayed what he 
did not intend to have revealed, namely, the conversation that 
had passed between himself and the Spanish Princess. Ciga- 
rette caught at the inference with the quickness of her light- 
ning-like thought. 

“ Oh, he ! So it is she ! ” 

There was a whole world of emphasis, scorn, meaning, wrath, 
comprehension, and irony in the four monosyllables; the dying 
man looked at her with languid wonder. 

“ She ? Who ? What story goes with these roses ? ” 

“Hone,” said Cecil, with the same inflection of annoyance 
in his voice; to have his passing encounter with this beautiful 


THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE. 


349 


patrician pass into a barrack canard, through the unsparing 
jests of the soldiery around him, was a prospect very unwelcome 
to him. “ None whatever. A generous thoughtfulness for our 
common necessities as soldiers ” 

“ Ouf ! ” interrupted Cigarette, before his phrase was one- 
third finished. “ The stalled mare will not go with the wild 
coursers ; an aristocrat may live with us, but he will always 
cling to his old order. This is the story that runs with the 
roses. Miladi was languidly insolent over some ivory chessmen, 
and Corporal Victor thought it divine, because languor and 
insolence are the twin gods of the noblesse, parbleu! Miladi, 
knowing no gods but those two, worships them, and sends to 
the soldiers of France, as the sort of sacrifice her gods love, 
fruits, and wines that, day after day, are set on her table, 
to be touched, if tasted at all, with a butterfly’s sip; and Cor- 
poral Victor finds this a charity sublime — to give what costs 
nothing, and scatter a few crumbs out from the profusion of 
a life of waste and indulgence! And I say that, if my children 
are of my fashion of thinking, they will choke like dogs dying 
of thirst rather than slake their throats with alms cast to them 
as if they were beggars ! ” 

With which fiery and bitter enunciation of her views on the 
gifts of the Princess Corona d’Amagiie, Cigarette struck light 
to her brule-guele, and thrusting it between her lips, with her 
hands in the folds of her scarlet waist-sash, went off with the 
light, swift step natural to her, exaggerated into the carriage 
she had learned of the Zouaves; laughing her good-morrows 
noisily to this and that trooper as she passed their couches, and 
not dropping her voice even as she passed the place where the 
dead lay, but singing, as loud as she could, the most impudent 
drinking-song out of the taverns of the Spahis that ever cele- 
brated wine, women, and war in the lawlessness of the lingua 
Sabir. r. 

Her wrath was hot, and her heart heavy within her. She 
had given up her whole fete-day to wait on the anguish and to 
soothe the solitude of his friend lying dying there; and her 
reward had been to hear him speak of this aristocrat’s dona- 
tions, that cost her nothing but the trouble of a few words of 
command to her household, as though they were the saintly 
charities of some angel from heaven! 

“ Diantre ! ” she muttered, as her hand wandered to the ever- 
beloved forms of the pistols within her sash. “ Chaffaurees or 


350 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


Achmet, or any of them, would throw a draught of wine in his 
face, and lay him dead for me with a pass or two ten minutes 
after. Why don’t I bid them? I have a mind ” 

In that moment she could have shot him dead herself with- 
out a second’s thought. Storm and sunlight swept, one after 
another, with electrical rapidity at all times, through her vivid, 
changeful temper; and here she had been wounded and been 
stung in the very hour in which she had subdued her national 
love of mirth, and her childlike passion for show, and her 
impatience of all confinement, and her hatred of all things 
mournful, to the attainment of this self -negation ! Moreover, 
there mingled with it the fierce and intolerant heat of the pas- 
sionate and scarce-conscious jealousy of an utterly untamed 
nature, and of Gallic blood, quick and hot as the steaming 
springs of the Geyser. 

“You have vexed her, Victor,” said Leon Kamon, as she 
was lost to sight through the doors of the great, desolate 
chamber. 

“ I hope not ; I do not know how,” answered Cecil. “ It is 
impossible to follow the windings of her wayward caprices. A 
child — a soldier — a dancer — a brigand — a spoiled beauty — a 
mischievous gamin — how is one to treat such a little fagot of 
opposites ? ” 

The other smiled. 

“ Ah ! you do not know the Little One yet. She is worth 
a study. I painted her years ago — ‘ La Vivandiere a Sept Ans.’ 
There was not a picture in the Salon that winter that was 
sought like it. I had traveled in Algeria then; I had not en- 
tered the army. The first thing I saw of Cigarette was this: 
She was seven years old; she had been beaten black and blue; 
she had had two of her tiny teeth knocked out. The men were 
furious — she was a pet with them; and she would not say who 
had done it, though she knew twenty swords would have beaten 
him flat as a fritter if she had given his name. I got her to 
sit to me some days after. I pleased her with her own picture. 
I asked her to tell me why she would not say who had ill- 
treated her. She put her head on one side like a robin, and 
told me, in a whisper: ‘It was one of my comrades — because 
I would not steal for him. I would not have the army know — 
it would demoralize them. If a French soldier ever does a 
cowardly thing, another French soldier must not betray it. 
That was Cigarette — at seven years. The esprit de corps was 


THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE. 351 

stronger than her own wrongs. What do you say to that na- 
ture ? ” 

“ That it is superb ! — that it might be molded to anything. 
The pity is ” 

“ Ah, tais-toi ! ” said the artist-trooper, half wearily, half 
laughingly. “ Spare me the old world-worn, threadbare for- 
mulas. Because the flax and the laleza blossom for use, and 
the garden flowers grow trained and pruned, must there be no 
bud that opens for mere love of the sun, and swings free in the 
wind in its fearless, fair fashion? Believe me, dear Victor, it 
is the lives which follow no previous rule that do the most good 
and give the most harvest.” 

“ Surely. Only for this child — a woman — in her future ” 

“Her future? Well, she will die, I dare say, some bright 
day or another, at the head of a regiment; with some desperate 
battle turned by the valor of her charge, and the sight of the 
torn tricolor upheld in her little hands. That is what Cigarette 
hopes for — why not? There will always be a million of com- 
monplace women ready to keep up the decorous traditions of 
their sex, and sit in safety over their needles by the side of their 
hearths. One little lioness here and there in a generation can- 
not do overmuch harm.” 

Cecil was silent. He would not cross the words of the 
wounded man by saying what might bring a train of less pleas- 
ant thoughts — saying what, in truth, was in his mind, that the 
future which he had meant for the little Friend of the Flag 
was not that of any glorious death by combat, but that of a life 
(unless no bullet early cut its silver cord in twain) when youth 
should have fled, and have carried forever with it her number- 
less graces, and left in its stead that ribaldry-stained, drink- 
defiled, hardened, battered, joyless, cruel, terrible thing which 
is unsightly and repugnant to even the lowest among men; 
which is as the lees of the drunk wine, as the ashes of the 
burned-out fires, as the discord of the broken and earth-clogged 
lyre. 

Cigarette was charming now — a fairy-story set into living 
motion — a fantastic little firework out of an extravaganza, with 
the impudence of a boy-harlequin and the witching kitten- 
hood of a girl’s beauty. But when this youth that made it all 
fair should have passed (and youth passes soon when thus 
adrift on the world), when there should be left in its stead 
only shamelessness, hardihood, vice, weariness — those who 


352 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


found the prettiest jest in her now would be the first to cast 
aside, with an oath, the charred, wrecked rocket-stick of a life 
from which no golden, careless stream of many-colored fires of 
coquette caprices would rise and enchant them then. 

“ Who is it that sent these ? ” asked Leon Eamon, later on, 
as his hands still wandered among the flowers; for the moment 
he was at peace ; the ice and the hours of quietude had calmed 
him. 

Cecil told him again. 

“ What does Cigarette know of her ? ” he pursued. 

“ Nothing, except, I believe, she knew that Mme. Corona ac- 
cepted my chess-carvings.” 

“ Ah ! I thought the Little One was jealous, Victor.” 

“Jealous? Pshaw! Of whom?” 

“ Of anyone you admire — especially of this grande dame.” 

“ Absurd ! ” said Cecil, with a sense of annoyance. “ Ciga- 
rette is far too bold a little trooper to have any thoughts of 
those follies; and as for this grande dame, as you call her, I 
shall, in every likelihood, never see her again — unless when the 
word is given to ‘ Carry Swords ’ or ‘ Lances 1 at the General’s 
Salute, where she reins her horse beside M. le Marechal’s at 
a review, as I have done this morning.” 

The keen ear of the sick man caught the inflection of an 
impatience, of a mortification, in the tone that the speaker him- 
self was unconscious of. He guessed the truth — that Cecil had 
never felt more restless under the shadow of the Eagles than 
he had done when he had carried his sword up in the salute 
as he passed with his regiment the flagstaff where the aristoc- 
racy of Algiers had been gathered about the Marshal and his 
staff, and the azure eyes of Mme. la Princesse had glanced care- 
lessly and critically over the long line of gray horses of those 
Chasseurs d’Afrique among whom he rode a bas-officier. 

“ Cigarette is right,” said Ramon, with a slight smile. 
“Your heart is with your old order. You are ‘aristocrat au 
bout des ongles.’ ” 

“ Indeed I am not, mon ami ; I am a mere trooper.” 

“Now! Well, keep your history as you have always done, if 
you will. What my friend was matters nothing; I know well 
what he is, and how true a friend. As for Miladi, she will be 
best out of your path, Victor. Women! God! — they are so 
fatal!” 

“Does not our folly make their fatality?” 


THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE. 


353 


“ Not always; not often. The madness may be ours, but they 
sow it. Ah ! do they not know how to rouse and enrage it ; how 
to fan, to burn, to lull, to pierce, to slake, to inflame, to entice, 
to sting ? Heavens ! so well they know — that their beauty must 
come, one thinks, out of hell itself ! ” 

His great eyes gleamed like fire, his hollow chest panted for 
breath, the sweat stood out on his temples. Cecil sought to 
soothe him, but his words rushed on with the impetuous course 
of the passionate memories that arose in him. 

“ Do you know what brought me here ? No ! As little as 
I know what brought you, though we have been close comrades 
all these years. Well, it was she! I was an artist. I had no 
money, I had few friends; but I had youth, I had ambition, I 
had, I think, genius, till she killed it. I loved my art with a 
great love, and I was happy. Even in Paris one can be so 
happy without wealth, while one is young. The mirth of the 
Barriere — the grotesques of the Halles — the wooden booths on 
New Year’s Day — the bright midnight crowds under the gas- 
lights — the bursts of music from the gay cafes — the gray little 
nuns flitting through the snow — the Mardi Gras and the Old- 
World fooleries — the summer Sundays under the leaves while 
we laughed like children — the silent dreams through the length 
of the Louvre — dreams that went home with us and made our 
garret bright with their visions — one was happy in them — 
happy, happy ! ” 

His eyes were still fastened on the blank, white wall before 
him while he spoke, as though the things that his words 
sketched so faintly were painted in all their vivid colors on the 
dull, blank surface. And so in truth they were, as remem- 
brance pictured all the thousand perished hours of his youth. 

“ Happy — until she looked at me,” he pursued, while his 
voice flew in feverish haste over the words. “ Why would she 
not let me be? She had them all in her golden nets: nobles, 
and princes, and poets, and soldiers — she swept them in far and 
wide. She had her empire; why must she seek out a man who 
had but his art and his youth, and steal those? Women are 
so insatiate, look you; though they held all the world, they 
would not rest if one mote in the air swam in sunshine, free of 
them! It was the first year I touched triumph that I saw her. 
They began for the first time to speak of me; it was the little 
painting of Cigarette, as a child of the army, that did it. Ah, 
God! I thought myself already so famous! Well, she sent for 


354 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


me to take her picture, and I went. I went and I painted her 
as Cleopatra — by her wish. Ah! it was a face for Cleopatra — 
the eyes that burn your youth dead, the lips that kiss your 
honor blind! A face — my God! how beautiful! She had set 
herself to gain my soul; and as the picture grew, and grew, and 
grew, so my life grew into hers till I lived only by her breath. 
Why did she want my life? she had so many! She had rich 
lives, great lives, grand lives at her bidding; and yet she knew 
no rest till she had leaned down from her cruel height and had 
seized mine, that had nothing on earth but the joys of the sun 
and the dew, and the falling of night, and the dawning of day, 
that are given to the birds of the fields.” 

His chest heaved with the spasms that with each throe seemed 
to tear his frame asunder; still he conquered them, and his 
words went on; his eyes fastened on the burning white glare 
of the wall as though all the beauty of this woman glowed 
afresh there to his sight. 

“ She was great ; no matter her name — she lives still. She 
was vile; aye, but not in my sight till too late. Why is it that 
men never love so well as where they love their own ruin ? That 
the heart which is pure never makes ours beat upon it with the 
rapture sin gives ? Through month on month my picture grew, 
and my passion grew with it, fanned by her hand. She knew 
that never would a man paint her beauty like one who gave his 
soul for the price of success. I had my paradise ; I was drunk ; 
and I painted as never the colors of mortals painted a woman. 
I think even she was content; even she, who in her superb 
arrogance thought she was matchless and deathless. Then came 
my reward ; when the picture was done, her fancy had changed ! 
A light scorn, a careless laugh, a touch of her fan on my cheek; 
could I not understand? Was I still such a child? Must I be 
broken more harshly in to learn to give place? That was all! 
and at last her lackey pushed me back with his wand from her 
gates ! What would you ? I had not known what a great lady’s 
illicit caprices meant ; I was still but a boy ! She had killed me ; 
she had struck my genius dead; she had made earth my hell — 
what of that? She had her beauty eternal in the picture she 
needed, and the whole city rang with her loveliness as they 
looked on my work. I have never painted again. I came here. 
What of that ? An artist the less then, the world did not care ; 
a life the less soon, she will not care either ! ” 

Then, as the Words ended, a great wave of blood beat back 


THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE. 


355 


his breath and burst from the pent-up torture of his striving 
lungs, and stained red the dark and silken masses of his beard. 
His comrade had seen the hemorrhage many times ; yet 
now he knew, as he had never known before, that that was 
death. 

As he held him upward in his arms, and shouted loud for 
help, the great luminous eyes of the French soldier looked up 
at him through their mist with the deep, fond gratitude that 
beams in the eyes of a dog as it drops down to die, knowing one 
touch and one voice to the last. 

“ You do not forsake,” he murmured brokenly, while his 
voice ebbed faintly away as the stream of his life flowed faster 
and faster out. “ It is over now — so best ! If only I could have 
seen France once more. France ” 

He stretched his arms outward as he spoke, with the vain 
longing of a hopeless love. Then a deep sigh quivered through 
his lips; his hand strove to close on the hand of his comrade, 
and his head fell, resting on the flushed blossoms of the rose- 
buds of Provence. 

He was dead. 

An hour later Cecil left the hospital, seeing and hearing noth- 
ing of the gay riot of the town about him, though the folds 
of many-colored silk and bunting fluttered across the narrow 
Moorish streets, and the whole of the populace was swarming 
through them with the vivacious enjoyment of Paris mingling 
with the stately, picturesque life of Arab habit and custom. He 
was well used to pain of every sort; his bread had long been 
the bread of bitterness, and the waters of his draught been of 
gall. Yet this stroke, though looked for, fell heavily and cut 
far. 

Yonder, in the deadroom, there lay a broken, useless mass of 
flesh and bone that in the sight of the Bureau Arabe was only 
a worn-out machine that had paid its due toll to the wars of the 
Second Empire, and was now valueless ; only fit to be cast in to 
rot, unmourned, in the devouring African soil. But to him that 
lifeless, useless mass was dear still ; was the wreck of the bravest, 
tenderest, and best-beloved friend that he had found in his ad- 
versity. 

In Leon Ramon he had found a man whom he had loved, and 
who had loved him. They had suffered much, and much en- 
dured together; their very dissimilarities had seemed to draw 


356 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


them nearer to each other. The gentle impassiveness of the 
Englishman had been like rest to the ardent impetuosity of the 
French soldier; the passionate and poetic temperament of the 
artist-trooper had revealed to Cecil a thousand views of thought 
and of feeling which had never before then dawned on him. 
And now that the one lay dead, a heavy, weary sense of loneli- 
ness rested on the other. They died around him every day; 
the fearless, fiery blood of France watered in ceaseless streams 
the arid, harvestless fields of northern Africa. Death was so 
common that the fall of a comrade was no more noted by them 
than the fall of a loose stone that their horse’s foot shook down 
a precipice. Yet this death was very bitter to him. He won- 
dered with a dull sense of aching impatience why no Bedouin 
bullet, no Arab saber, had ever found his own life out, and cut 
his thralls asunder. 

The evening had just followed on the glow of the day — even- 
ing, more lustrous even than ever, for the houses were all aglit- 
ter with endless lines of colored lamps and strings of sparkling 
illuminations, a very sea of bright-hued fire. The noise, the 
mirth, the sudden swell of music, the pleasure-seeking crowds — 
all that were about him — served only to make more desolate and 
more oppressive by their contrast his memories of that life, 
once gracious, and gifted, and content with the dower of its 
youth, ruined by a woman, and now slaughtered here, for no 
avail and with no honor, by a lance-thrust in a midnight skir- 
mish, which had been unrecorded even in the few lines of the 
gazette that chronicled the war news of Algeria. 

Passing one of the cafes, a favorite resort of the officers of 
his own regiment, he saw Cigarette. A sheaf of blue, and 
white, and scarlet lights flashed with tongues of golden flame 
over her head, and a great tricolor flag, with the brass eagle 
above it, was hanging in the still, hot air from the balcony from 
which she leaned. Her tunic-skirt was full of bonbons and 
crackers that she was flinging down among the crowd while 
she sang; stopping every now and then to exchange some pas- 
sage of gaulois wit with them that made her hearers scream 
with laughter, while behind her was a throng of young officers 
drinking champagne, eating ices, and smoking; echoing her 
songs and her satires with enthusiastic voices and stamps of 
their spurred bootheels. As he glanced upward, she looked 
literally in a blaze of luminance, and the wild, mellow tones 
of her voice, ringing out in the “ Rien n’est sacre pour un 


THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE. 357 

Sapeur,” sounded like a mockery of that dying-bed beside which 
they had both so late stood together. 

“ She has the playfulness of the young leopard, and the 
cruelty,” he thought, with a sense of disgust; forgetting that 
she did not know what he knew, and that, if Cigarette had 
waited to laugh until death had passed by, she would have 
never laughed all her life through, in the battalions of Africa. 

She saw him, as he went beneath her balcony; and she sung 
all the louder, she flung her sweetmeat missiles with the reck- 
less force of a Roman Carnivalist; she launched bolts of ten- 
fold more audacious raillery at the delighted mob below. Ciga- 
rette was “ bon soldat ” ; when she was wounded, she wound 
her scarf round the nerve that ached, and only laughed the 
gayer. 

And he did her that injustice which the best among us are 
apt to do to those whom we do not feel interest enough in to 
study with that closeness which can alone give comprehension 
of the intricate and complex rebus, so faintly sketched, so mar- 
velously involved, of human nature. 

He thought her a little leopard, in her vivacious play and 
her inborn bloodthirstiness. 

Well, the little leopard of France played recklessly enough 
that evening. Algiers was en fete, and Cigarette was sparkling 
over the whole of the town like a humming-bird or a firefly — 
here and there, and everywhere, in a thousand places at once, as 
it seemed; staying long with none, making music and mirth 
with all. Waltzing like a thing possessed, pelting her lovers 
with a tempest storm of dragees, standing on the head of a 
gigantic Spahi en tableau amid a shower of fireworks, impro- 
vising slang songs worthy of Jean Vade and his Poissardes, 
and chorused by a hundred lusty lungs that yelled the burden 
in riotous glee as furiously as they were accustomed to shout 
“ En avant ! ” in assault and in charge, Cigarette made amends 
to herself at night for her vain self-sacrifice of the fete-day. 

She had her wound; yes, it throbbed still now and then, and 
stung like a bee in the warm core of a rose. But she was 
young, she was gay, she was a little philosopher; above all, she 
was French, and in the real French blood happiness runs so 
richly that it will hardly be utterly chilled until the veins 
freeze in the coldness of death. She enjoyed — enjoyed all the 
more fiercely, perhaps, because a certain desperate bitterness 
mingled with the abandonment of her Queen Mab-like revelries. 


358 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


Until now Cigarette had been as absolutely heedless and with- 
out a care as any young bird, taking its first summer circles 
downward through the intoxication of the sunny air. It was 
not without fiery resistance and scornful revolt that the mad- 
cap Figlia del Reggimento would be prevailed on to admit that 
any shadow could have power to rest on her. 

She played through more than half the night, with the agile, 
bounding, graceful play of the young leopard to which he had 
likened her, and with a quick punishment from her velvet- 
sheathed talons if any durst offend her. Then when the dawn 
was nigh, leopard-like, the Little One sought her den. 

She was most commonly under canvas; but when she was 
in town it was at one with the proud independence of her nature 
that she rejected all offers made her, and would have her own 
nook to live in, even though she were not there one hour out 
of the twenty-four. 

“ Le Chateau de Cigarette ” was a standing jest of the Army; 
for none was ever allowed to follow her thither, or to behold 
the interior of her fortress; and one overventurous Spahi, scal- 
ing the ramparts, had been rewarded with so hot a deluge of 
lentil soup from a boiling casserole poured on his head from 
above, that he had beaten a hasty and ignominious retreat — 
which was more than a whole tribe of the most warlike of his 
countrymen could ever have made him do. 

“ Le Chateau de Cigarette ” was neither more nor less than 
a couple of garrets, high in the air, in an old Moorish house, 
in an old Moorish court, decayed, silent, poverty-struck; with 
the wild pumpkin thrusting its leaves through the broken fret- 
work, and the green lizard shooting over the broad pavements, 
once brilliant in mosaic, that the robes of the princes of Islam 
had swept; now carpeted deep with the dry, white, drifted dust, 
and only crossed by the tottering feet of aged Jews or the laden 
steps of Algerine women. 

Up a long, winding, rickety stair Cigarette approached her 
castle, which was very near the sky indeed. “ I like the blue,” 
said the chatelaine laconically, “ and the pigeons fly close by 
my window.” And through it, too, she might have added; for, 
though no human thing might invade her chateau, the pigeons, 
circling in the sunrise light, always knew well there were rice 
and crumbs spread for them in that eyelet-hcle of a casement. 

Cigarette threaded her agile way up the dark, ladder-like 
shaft, and opened her door. There was a dim oil wick burning ; 


THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE. 


359 


the garret was large, and as clean as a palace could be; its oc- 
cupants were various, and all sound asleep except one, who, 
rough, and hard, and small, and three-legged, limped up to her 
and rubbed a little bullet head against her lovingly. 

“ Bouffarick — p’tit Bouffarick ! ” returned Cigarette caress- 
ingly, in a whisper, and Bouffarick, content, limped back to a 
nest of hay ; being a little wiry dog that had lost a leg in one of 
the most famous battles of Oran, and lain in its dead master’s 
breast through three days and nights on the field. Cigarette, 
shading the lamp with one hand, glanced round on her family. 

They had all histories — histories in the French Army, which 
was the only history she considered of any import to the uni- 
verse. There was a raven perched high, by name Vole-qui- 
Yeut; he was a noted character among the Zouaves, and had 
made many a campaign riding on his owner’s bayonet ; he loved 
a combat, and was specially famed for screaming “ Tue ! tue ! 
tue ! ” all over a battlefield ; he was very gray now, and the 
Zouave’s bones had long bleached on the edge of the desert. 

There was a tame rat who was a vieille moustache, and who 
had lived many years in a Lignard’s pocket, and munched waifs 
and strays of the military rations, until, the enormous crime 
being discovered that it was taught to sit up and dress its 
whiskers to the heinous air of the “ Marseillaise,” the Lignard 
got the matraque, and the rat was condemned to be killed, had 
not Cigarette dashed in to the rescue and carried the long- 
tailed revolutionist off in safety. 

There was a big white cat curled in a ball, who had been 
the darling of a Tringlo, and had traveled all over North Africa 
on the top of his mule’s back, seven seasons through; in the 
eighth the Tringlo was picked off by a flying shot, and an In- 
digene was about to skin the shrieking Boule Blanche for the 
soup-pot, when a bullet broke his wrist, making him drop the 
cat with a yell of pain, and the Friend of the Flag, catching it 
up, laughed in his face : “ A lead comfit instead of slaughter- 
soup, my friend ! ” 

There were little Bouffarick and three other brother-dogs 
of equal celebrity; one, in especial, who had been brought from 
Chalons, in defiance of the regulations, inside the drum of his 
regiment, and had been wounded a dozen times ; always seeking 
the hottest heat of the skirmish. And there was, besides these, 
sleeping serenely on a straw paillasse, a very old man with a 
snowy beard and a head fit for Gerome to give to an Abraham. 


360 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


A very old man — one who had been a conscript in the bands 
of Young France, and marched from his Pyrenean village to 
the battle tramp of the Marseillaise, and charged with the 
Enf ants de Paris across the plains of Gemappes ; who had known 
the passage of the Alps, and lifted the long curls from the dead 
brow of Dessaix at Marengo, and seen in the sultry noonday 
dust of a glorious summer the Guard march into Paris, while 
the people laughed and wept with joy; surging like the mighty 
sea around one pale, frail form, so young by years, so absolute 
by genius. 

A very old man; long broken with poverty, with pain, with 
bereavement, with extreme old age; and, by a long course of 
cruel accidents, alone, here in Africa, without one left of the 
friends of his youth, or of the children of his name, and de- 
prived even of the charities due from his country to his services 
— alone, save for the little Friend of the Flag, who, for four 
years, had kept him on the proceeds of her wine trade, in this 
Moorish attic; tending him herself when in town, taking heed 
that he should want for nothing when she was campaigning. 

“ I will have a care of him,” she had said curtly, when she 
had found him in great misery and learned his history from 
others; and she had had the care accordingly, maintaining him 
at her own cost in the Moorish building, and paying a good 
Jewess of the quarter to tend him when she was not herself in 
Algiers. 

The old man was almost dead, mentally, though in bodily 
strength still well able to know the physical comforts of food, 
and rest, and attendance; he was in his second childhood, in 
his ninetieth year, and was unconscious of the debt he owed 
her ; even, with a curious caprice of decrepitude, he disliked her, 
and noticed nothing, except the raven when it shrieked its 
“Tue! tue! tue!” But to Cigarette he was as sacred as a 
god ; had he not fought beneath the glance, and gazed upon the 
face, of the First Consul? 

She bent over him now, saw that he slept, busied herself 
noiselessly in brewing a little tin pot full of coffee and hot milk, 
set it over the lamp to keep it warm, and placed it beside him 
ready for his morning meal, with a roll of white wheat bread; 
then, with a glance round to see that her other dependents 
wanted for nothing, went to her own garret adjoining, and with 
the lattice fastened back, that the first rays of sunrise and the 
first white flash of her friends the pigeons’ gleaming wings 


THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE. 


361 


might awaken her, threw herself on her straw and slept with 
all the graceful, careless rest of the childhood which, though 
in one sense she had never known, yet in another had never 
forsaken her. 

She hid as her lawless courage would not have stooped to hide 
a sin, had she chosen to commit one, this compassion which 
she, the young condottiera of Algeria, showed with so tender 
a charity to the soldier of Bonaparte. To him, moreover, her 
fiery, imperious voice was gentle as the dove; her wayward, 
dominant will was pliant as the reed ; her contemptuous, skeptic 
spirit was reverent as a child’s before an altar. In her sight the 
survivor of the Army of Italy was sacred; sacred tl^e eyes 
which, when full of light, had seen the sun glitter on the 
breastplates of the Hussars of Murat, the Dragoons of Keller- 
man, the Cuirassiers of Milhaud ; sacred the hands which, when 
nervous with youth, had borne the standard of the Republic 
victorious against the gathered Teuton host in the Thermopylae 
of Champagne; sacred the ears which, when quick to hear, had 
heard the thunder of Areola, of Lodi, of Rivoli, and, above even 
the tempest of war, the clear, still voice of Napoleon; sacred 
the lips which, when their beard was dark in the fullness of 
manhood, had quivered, as with a woman’s weeping, at the 
farewell, in the spring night, in the moonlit Cour des Adieux. 

Cigarette had a religion of her own; and followed it more 
closely than most disciples follow other creeds. 


CHAPTER XXIV. 


“ MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS.” 

Early that morning, when the snowy cloud of pigeons were 
circling down to take their daily alms from Cigarette, where 
her bright brown face looked out from the lattice-hole, Cecil, 
with some of the roughriders of his regiment, was sent far into 
the interior to bring in a string of colts, bought of a friendly 
desert tribe, and destined to be shipped to France for the Im- 
perial Haras. The mission took two days; early on the third 
day they returned with the string of wild young horses, whom 
it had taken not a little exertion and address to conduct suc- 
cessfully through the country into Algiers. 

He was usually kept in incessant activity, because those in 
command over him had quickly discovered the immeasurable 
value of a bas-officier who was certain to enforce and obtain im- 
plicit obedience, and certain to execute any command given 
him with perfect address and surety, yet, who, at the same 
time, was adored by his men, and had acquired a most sin- 
gularly advantageous influence over them. But of this he was 
always glad; throughout his twelve years’ service under the 
Emperor’s flag, he had only found those moments in which he 
was unemployed intolerable; he would willingly have been in 
the saddle from dawn till midnight. 

Chateauroy was himself present when the colts were taken 
into the stable-yard ; and himself inquired, without the medium 
of any third person, the whole details of the sale and of the 
transit. It was impossible, with all his inclination, to find any 
fault either with the execution of the errand or with the brief, 
respectful answers by which his corporal replied to his rapid 
and imperious cross-questionings. There were a great number 
of men within hearing, many of them the most daring and re- 
bellious pratiques of the regiment ; and Cecil would have let the 
coarsest upbraidings scourge him rather than put the tempta- 
tion to mutiny in their way which one insubordinate or even 
not strictly deferential word from him would have given. Hence 
the inspection passed off peaceably; as the Marquis turned on 
his heel, however, he paused a moment. 

362 


363 


“miladi aux beaux yeux bleus.” 

“ Victor ! ” 

“ Mon Commandant ? 99 

“ I have not forgotten your insolence with those ivory toys. 
But Mme. la Princesse herself has deigned to solicit that it 
shall be passed over unpunished. She cannot, of course, yield 
to your impertinent request to remain also unpaid for them. I 
charged myself with the fulfillment of her wishes. You deserve 
the matraque, but since Miladi herself is lenient enough to 
pardon you, you are to take this instead. Hold your hand, 
sir ! ” 

Cecil put out his hand; he expected to receive a heavy blow 
from his commander’s saber, that possibly might break tho 
wrist. These little trifles were common in Africa. 

Instead, a rouleau of Napoleons was laid on his open palm. 
Chateauroy knew the gold would sting more than the blow. 

For the moment Cecil had but one impulse — to dash the 
pieces in the giver’s face. In time to restrain the impulse, he 
caught sight of the wild, eager hatred gleaming in the eyes of 
Bake, of Petit Picpon, of a score of others, who loved him and 
cursed their Colonel, and would at one signal from him have 
sheathed their swords in the mighty frame of the Marquis, 
though they should have been fired down the next moment 
themselves for the murder. The warning of Cigarette came to 
his memory; his hand clasped on the gold; he gave the salute 
calmly as Chateauroy swung himself away. 

The troops looked at him with longing, questioning eyes; 
they knew enough of him by now to know the bitterness such 
gold, so given, had for him. Any other, even a corporal, would 
have been challenged with a storm of raillery, a volley of con- 
gratulation, and would have had shouted or hissed after him 
opprobrious accusations of “ faisant suisse ” if he had not forth- 
with treated his comrades royally from such largesse. With 
Bel-a-faire-peur they held their peace; they kept the silence 
which they saw that he wished to keep, as, his hour of liberty 
being come, he went slowly out of the great court with the 
handful of Napoleons thrust in the folds of his sash. 

Bather unconsciously than by premeditation his steps turned 
through the streets that led to his old familiar haunt, the As 
de Pique; and dropping down on a bench under the awning, 
he asked for a draught of water. It was brought him at once; 
the hostess, a quick, brown little woman from Paris, whom the 
lovers of Eugene Sue called Bigolette, adding of her own ac- 


364 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


cord a lump of ice and a slice or two of lemon, for which she 
vivaciously refused payment, though generosity was by no 
means her cardinal virtue. 

“ Bel-a-f aire-peur ” awakened general interest through Al- 
giers; he brought so fiery and so daring a reputation with him 
from the wars and raids of the interior, yet he was so calm, 
so grave, so gentle, so listless. It was known that he had made 
himself the terror of Kabyle and Bedouin, yet here in the city 
he thanked the negro boy who took him a glass of lemonade 
at an estaminet, and sharply rebuked one of his men for knock- 
ing down an old colon with a burden of gourds and of melons;, 
such a Roumi as this the good people of the Franco- African 
capital held as a perfect gift of the gods, and not understand- 
ing one whit, nevertheless fully appreciated. 

He did not look at the newspapers she offered him; but sat 
gazing out from the tawny awning, like the sail of a Neapolitan 
felucca, down the checkered shadows and the many-colored 
masses of the little, crooked, rambling, semi-barbaric alley. He 
was thinking of the Napoleons in his sash and of the promise 
he had pledged to Cigarette. That he would keep it he was 
resolved. The few impressive, vivid words of the young vi- 
vandiere had painted before him like a picture the horrors of 
mutiny and its hopelessness; rather than that, through him, 
these should befall the men who had become his brethren-in- 
arms, he felt ready to let the Black Hawk do his worst on his 
own life. Yet a weariness, a bitterness, he had never known 
in the excitement of active service came on him, brought by 
this sting of insult brought from the fair hand of an aristo- 
crate. 

There was absolutely no hope possible in his future. The 
uttermost that could ever come to him would be a grade some- 
thing higher in the army that now enrolled him; the gift of 
the cross, or a post in the bureau. Algerine warfare was not 
like the campaigns of the armies of Italy or the Rhine, and 
there was no Napoleon here to discern with unerring omnis- 
cence a leader’s genius under the kepi of a common trooper. 
Though he should show the qualities of a Massena or a Kleber, 
the chances were a million to one that he would never get even 
so much as a lieutenancy ; and the raids on the decimated tribes, 
the obscure skirmishes of the interior, though terrible in 
slaughter and venturesome enough, were not the fields on which 
great military successes were won and great military honors. 


MIL ADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS.” 365 

acquired. The French fought for a barren strip of brown 
plateau that, gained, would be of little use or profit to them; 
he thought that he did much the same, that his future was 
much like those arid sand-plains, those thirsty, verdureless 
stretches of burned earth — very little worth the reaching. 

The heavy folds of a Bedouin’s haick, brushing the papers 
off the bench, broke the thread of his musings. As he stooped 
for them, he saw that one was an English journal some weeks 
old. His own name caught his eye — the name buried so ut- 
terly, whose utterance in the Sheik’s tent had struck him like 
a dagger’s thrust. The flickering light and darkness, as the 
awning waved to and fro, made the lines move dizzily upward 
and downward as he read — read the short paragraph touching 
the fortunes of the race that had disowned him : 

“ The Royallieu Succession. — We regret to learn that the 
Rt. Hon. Viscount Royallieu, who so lately succeeded to the 
family title on his father’s death, has expired at Mentone, 
whither his health had induced him to go some months previous. 
The late Lord was unmarried. His next brother was, it will be 
remembered, many years ago, killed on a southern railway. The 
title, therefore, now falls to the third and only remaining son, 
the Hon. Berkeley Cecil, who, having lately inherited consid- 
erable properties from a distant relative, will, we believe, revive 
all the old glories of this Peerage, which have, from a variety 
of causes, lost somewhat of their ancient brilliancy.” 

Cecil sat quite still, as he had sat looking down on the record 
of his father’s death, when Cigarette had rallied him with her 
gay challenge among the Moresco ruins. His face flushed hotly 
✓ under the warm, golden hue of the desert bronze, then lost all its 
color as suddenly, till it was as pale as any of the ivory he 
carved. The letters of the paper reeled and wavered, and grew 
misty before his eyes; he lost all sense of the noisy, changing, 
polyglot crowd thronging past him; he, a common soldier in 
the Algerian Cavalry, knew that, by every law of birthright, 
he was now a Peer of England. 

His first thought was for the dead man. True, there had 
been little amity, little intimacy, between them;* a negligent 
friendliness, whenever they had met, had been all that they had 
ever reached. But in their childhood they had been carelessly 
kind to one another, and the memory of the boy who had once 


366 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


played beside him down the old galleries and under the old 
forests, of the man who had now died yonder where the southern 
sea-board lay across the warm, blue Mediterranean, was alone 
on him for the moment. His thoughts had gone back, with a 
pang, almost ere he had read the opening lines, to autumn 
mornings in his youngest years when the leaves had been flushed 
with their earliest red, and the brown, still pools had been alive 
with water-birds, and the dogs had dropped down charging 
among the flags and rushes, and his brother’s boyish face had 
laughed on him from the wilderness of willows, and his brother’s 
boyish hands had taught him to handle his first cartridge and 
to fire his first shot. The many years of indifference and es- 
trangement were forgotten, the few years of childhood’s con- 
fidence and comradeship alone remembered, as he saw the words 
that brought him in his exile the story of his brethren’s fate 
and of his race’s fortunes. His head sank, his face was still 
colorless, he sat motionless with the printed sheet in his hand. 
Once his eyes flashed, his breath came fast and uneven ; he rose 
with a sudden impulse, with a proud, bold instinct of birth and 
freedom. Let him stand here in what grade he would, with 
the badge of a Corporal of the Army of Africa on his arm, 
this inheritance that had come to him was his; he bore the 
name and the title of his house as surely as any had ever borne 
it since the first of the Norman owners of Royallieu had fol- 
lowed the Bastard’s banner. 

The vagabond throngs — Moorish, Frank, Negro, Colon — 
paused as they pushed their way over the uneven road, and 
stared at him vacantly where he stood. There was something 
in his attitude, in his look, which swept over them, seeing none 
of them, in the eager lifting of his head, in the excited fire in 
his eyes, that arrested all — from the dullest muleteer, plodding 
on with his string of patient beasts, to the most volatile French 
girl laughing on her way with a group of fantassins. He did 
not note them, hear them, think of them; the whole of the 
Algerine scene had faded out as if it had no place before him ; 
he had forgot that he was a cavalry soldier of the Empire; 
he saw nothing but the green wealth of the old home woods far 
away in England; he remembered ' nothing save that he, and 
he alone, was the rightful Lord of Royallieu. 

“ Tiens, es-tu fou, mon brave? Bois de m’avoine,* Bel-a- 
f aire-peur ! ” 


* Brandy. 


“ MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS.” 


367 


The coarse, good-humored challenge, as the hand of a broad- 
chested, black-visaged veteran of Chasseurs fell on his shoulder, 
and the wooden rim of a little wine-cup was thrust toward him 
with the proffered drink, startled him and recalled him to the 
consciousness of where he was. He stared one moment ab- 
sently in the trooper’s amazed face, and then shook him off 
with a suddenness that tossed back the cup to the ground; and, 
holding the journal clinched close in his hand, went swiftly 
through the masses of the people — out and away, he little noted 
where — till he had forced his road beyond the gates, beyond the 
town, beyond all reach of its dust and its babble and its dis- 
cord, and was alone in the farther outskirts, where to the north 
the calm, sunlit bay slept peacefully with a few scattered ships 
riding at anchor, and southward the luxuriance of the Sahel 
stretched to meet the wide and cheerless plateaus, dotted with 
the conical houses of hair, and desolate as though the locust- 
swarm had just alighted there to lay them waste. 

Reaching the heights he stood still involuntarily, and looked 
down once more on the words that told him of his birthright; 
in the blinding, intense light of the African day they seemed 
to stand out as though carved in stone; and as he read them 
once more a great darkness passed over his face — this heritage 
was his, and he could never take it up; this thing had come 
to him, and he must never claim it. He was Viscount Royal- 
lieu as surely as any of his fathers had been so before him, and 
he was dead forever in the world’s belief ; he must live, and grow 
old, and perish by shot or steel, by sickness or by age, with his 
name and his rights buried, and his years passed as a private 
soldier of France. 

The momentary glow which had come to him, with the sudden 
resurrection of hope and of pride, faded utterly as he slowly 
read and re-read the lines of the journal on the broken terraces 
of the hill-side, where the great fig trees spread their fantastic 
shadows, and through a rocky channel a russet stream of shal- 
low waters threaded its downward path under the reeds, and no 
living thing was near him save some quiet browsing herds far 
off, and their Arab shepherd-lad that an artist might have 
sketched as Ishmael. What his future might have been rose 
before his thoughts ; what it must be rose also, bitterly, blackly, 
drearily, in contrast. A noble without even a name; a chief 
of his race without even the power to claim kinship with that 
race; owner by law of three thousand broad English acres, yet 


368 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


an exile without freedom to set foot on his native land; by 
heritage one among the aristocracy of England, by circum- 
stances, now and forever, till an Arab bullet should cut in twain 
his, thread of life, a soldier of the African legions, bound to 
obey the commonest and coarsest boor that had risen to a 
rank above him: this was what he knew himself to be, and 
knew that he must continue to be without one appeal against 
it, without once stretching out his hand toward his right of 
birth and station. 

There was a passionate revolt, a bitter heart-sickness on him; 
all the old freedom and peace and luxury and pleasure of the 
life he had left so long allured him with a terrible temptation; 
the honors of the rank that he should now have filled were 
not what he remembered. What he longed for with an agonized 
desire was to stand once more stainless among his equals; to 
reach once more the liberty of unchallenged, unfettered life; to 
return once more to those who held him but as a dishonored 
memory, as one whom violent death had well snatched from the 
shame of a criminal career. 

“ But who would believe me now ? ” he thought. “ Besides, 
this makes no difference. If three words spoken would rein- 
state me, I could not speak them at that cost. The beginning 
perhaps was folly, but for sheer justice’ sake there is no draw- 
ing back now. Let him enjoy it; God knows I do not grudge 
him it.” 

Yet, though it was true to the very core that no envy and no 
evil lay in his heart against the younger brother to whose lot 
had fallen all good gifts of men and fate, there was almost un- 
bearable anguish on him in this hour in which he learned the 
inheritance that had come to him, and remembered that he 
could never take again even so much of it as lay in the name of 
his fathers. When he had given his memory up to slander and 
oblivion, and the shadow of a great shame; when he had let 
his life die out from the world that had known him, and buried 
it beneath the rough, weather-stained, blood-soaked cloth of 
a private soldier’s uniform, he had not counted the cost then, 
nor foreseen the cost hereafter. It had fallen on him very 
heavily now. 

Where he stood under some sheltered columns of a long- 
ruined mosque whose shafts were bound together by a thousand 
withes and wreaths of the rich, fantastic Sahel foliage, an ex- 
ceeding weariness of longing was upon him — longing for all 


“miladi aux beaux yeux bleus.” 369 

that he had forfeited, for all that was his own, yet never could 
be claimed as his. 

The day was intensely still; there was not a sound except 
when, here and there, the movement of a lizard under the dry 
grasses gave a low, crackling rustle. He wondered almost which 
was the dream and which the truth: that old life that he had 
once led, and that looked now so far away and so unreal ; or this 
which had been about him for so many years in the camps and 
the bivouacs, the barracks and the battlefields. He wondered 
almost which he himself was — an English Peer on whom the 
title of his line had fallen, or a Corporal of Chasseurs who must 
take his chief’s insults as patiently as a cur takes the blows 
of its master ; that he was both seemed to him, as he stood there 
with the glisten of the sea before and the swelling slopes of the 
hillside above, a vague, distorted nightmare. 

Hours might have passed, or only moments — he could not 
have told ; his eyes looked blankly out at the sun-glow, his hand 
instinctively clinched on the journal whose stray lines had told 
him in an Algerine trattoria that he had inherited what he 
never could enjoy. 

“ Are they content, I wonder ? ” he thought, gazing down that 
fiery blaze of shadowless light. “ Do they ever remember ? ” 

He thought of those for whose sakes he had become what 
he was. 

The distant, mellow, ringing notes of a trumpet-call floated 
to his ear from the town at his feet; it was sounding the 
rentree en caserne. Old instinct, long habit, made him start 
and shake his harness together and listen. The trumpet-blast, 
winding cheerily from afar off, recalled him to the truth; sum- 
moned him sharply back from vain regrets to the facts of daily 
life. It waked him as it wakes a sleeping charger; it roused 
him as it rouses a wounded trooper. 

Pie stood hearkening to the familiar music till it had died 
away — spirited, yet still lingering ; full of fire, yet fading softly 
down the wind. He listened till the last echo ceased; then he 
tore the paper that he held in strips, and let it float away, drift- 
ing down the yellow current of the reedy river channel ; and he 
half drew from its scabbard the saber whose blade had been 
notched and dented and stained in many midnight skirmishes 
and many headlong charges under the desert suns, and looked 
at it as though a friend’s eye gazed at him in the gleam of the 
trusty steel. And his soldier-like philosophy, his campaigner’s 


370 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


carelessness, his habitual, easy negligence that had sometimes 
been weak as water and sometimes heroic as martyrdom, came 
back to him with a deeper shadow on it, that was grave with 
a calm, resolute, silent courage. 

“ So best after all, perhaps,” he said half aloud, in the soli- 
tude of the ruined and abandoned mosque. “ He cannot well 
come to shipwreck with such a fair wind and such a smooth sea. 
And I — I am just as well here. To ride with the Chasseurs 
is more exciting than to ride with the Pytchley; and the rules 
of the Chambree are scarce more tedious than the rules of a 
Court. Nature turned me out for a soldier, though Fashion 
spoiled me for one. I can make a good campaigner — I should 
never make anything else.” 

And he let his sword drop back again into the scabbard, and 
quarreled no more with fate. 

His hand touched the thirty gold pieces in his sash. 

He started, as the recollection of the forgotten insult came 
back on him. He stood a wdiile in thought; then he took his 
resolve. 

A half hour of quick movement, for he had become used 
to the heat as an Arab and heeded it as little, brought him 
before the entrance-gates of the Villa Aioussa. A native of 
Soudan, in a rich dress, who had the office of porter, asked him 
politely his errand. Every indigene learns by hard experience 
to be courteous to a French soldier. Cecil simply asked, in 
answer, if Mme. la Princesse were visible. The negro returned 
cautiously that she was at home, but doubted her being accessi- 
ble. “You come from M. le Marquis?” he inquired. 

“No; on my own errand.” 

“You!” Not all the native African awe of a Roumi could 
restrain the contemptuous amaze in the word. 

“I. Ask if Corporal Victor, of the Chasseurs, can be per- 
mitted a moment’s interview with your mistress. I come by 
permission,” he added, as the native hesitated between his 
fear of a Roumi and his sense of the appalling unfittingness of 
a private soldier seeking audience of a Spanish princess. The 
message was passed about between several of the household; at 
last a servant of higher authority appeared: 

“ Madame permitted Corporal Victor to be taken to her pres- 
ence. Would he follow?” 

He uncovered his head and entered, passing through several 
passages and chambers, richly hung and furnished; for the 


“ MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS.” 371 

villa had been the “ campagne ” of an illustrious F rench per- 
sonage, who had offered it to the Princess Corona when, for 
some slight delicacy of health, the air of Algeria was advocated. 
A singular sensation came on him, half of familiarity, half of 
strangeness, as he advanced along them; for twelve years he 
had seen nothing but the bare walls of barrack rooms, the goat- 
skin of douars, and the canvas of his own camp-tent. To come 
once more, after so long an interval, amid the old things of 
luxury and grace that had been so long unseen wrought curi- 
ously on him. He could not fairly disentangle past and pres- 
ent, F or the moment, as his feet fell once more on soft carpets, 
and his eyes glanced over gold and silver, malachite and bronze, 
white silk and violet damasks, he almost thought the Algerian 
years were a disordered dream of the night. 

His spur caught in the yielding carpet, and his saber clashed 
slightly against it; as the rentree au caserne had done an hour 
before, the sound recalled the actual present to him. He was 
but a French soldier, who went on sufferance into the presence 
of a great lady. All the rest was dead and buried. 

Some half dozen apartments, large and small, were crossed; 
then into that presence he was ushered. The room was deeply 
shaded, and fragrant with the odors of the innumerable flowers 
of the Sahel soil; there was that about it which struck on him 
as some air — long unheard, but once intimately familiar — on 
the ear will revive innumerable memories ; like the “ vieil air 
languissant et funebre,” for which Gerard de Horval was will- 
ing to give “ all Rossini and Weber.” She was at some dis- 
tance from him, with the trailing draperies of eastern fabrics 
falling about her in a rich, unbroken, shadowy cloud of melting 
color, through which, here and there, broke threads of gold ; in- 
voluntarily he paused on the threshold, looking at her. Some 
faint, far-off remembrance stirred in him, but deep down in 
the closed grave of his past; some vague, intangible association 
of forgotten days, forgotten thoughts, drifted before him as it 
had drifted before him when first in the Chambree of his bar- 
racks he had beheld Venetia Corona. 

She moved forward as her servant announced him; she saw 
him pause there like one spell-bound, and thought it the hesita- 
tion of one who felt sensitively his own low grade in life. She 
came toward him with the silent, sweeping grace that gave her 
the carriage of an empress; her voice fell on his ear with the 
accent of a woman immeasurably proud, but too proud not to 


372 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


bend softly and graciously to those who were so far beneath 
her that, without such aid from her, they could never have ad- 
dressed or have approached her. 

“You have come, I trust, to withdraw your prohibition? 
Nothing will give me greater pleasure than to bring his 
Majesty’s notice to one of the best soldiers his Army holds.” 

There was that in the words, gently as they were spoken, that 
recalled him suddenly to himself; they had that negligent, 
courteous pity she would have shown to some colon begging 
at her gates! He forgot — forgot utterly — that he was only an 
African trooper. He only remembered that he had once been 
a gentleman, that — if a life of honor and of self -negation can 
make any so — he was one still. He advanced and bowed with 
the old serene elegance that his bow had once been famed for; 
and she, well used to be even overcritical in such trifles, thought, 
“ That man has once lived in courts ! ” 

“ Pardon me, madame, I do not come to trespass so far upon 
your benignity,” he answered, as he bent before her. “ I come 
to express, rather, my regret that you should have made one 
single error.” 

“ Error ! ” — a haughty surprise glanced 'from her eyes as they 
swept over him. Such a word had never been used to her in 
the whole course of her brilliant and pampered life of sov- 
ereignty and indulgence. 

“ One common enough, madame, in your Order. The error 
to suppose that under the rough cloth of a private trooper’s uni- 
form there cannot possibly be such aristocratic monopolies as 
nerves to wound.” 

“ I do not comprehend you.” She spoke very coldly ; she 
repented her profoundly of her concession in admitting a Chas- 
seur d’Afrique to her presence. 

“ Possibly not. Mine was the folly to dream that you would 
ever do so. I should not have intruded on you now, but for 
this reason: the humiliation you were pleased to pass on me 
I could neither refuse nor resent to the dealer of it. Had I 
done so, men who are only too loyal to me would have resented 
with me, and been thrashed or been shot, as payment. I was 
compelled to accept it, and to wait until I could return your 
gift to you. I have no right to complain that you pained me 
with it, since one who occupies my position ought, I presume, to 
consider remembrance, even by an outrage, an honor done to 
him by the Princess Corona.” 



Photo by Byron 





















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u MIL ADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS.” 373 

As he said the last words he laid on a table that stood near 
him the gold of Chateauroy’s insult. She had listened with a 
bewildering wonder, held in check by the haughtier impulse of 
offense, that a man in this grade could venture thus to address, 
thus to arraign her. His words were totally incomprehensible 
to her, though, by the grave rebuke of his manner, she saw that 
they were fully meant, and, as he considered, fully authorized 
by some wrong done to him. As he laid the gold pieces down 
upon her table, an idea of the truth came to her. 

“ I know nothing of what you complain of ; I sent you no 
money. What is it you would imply ? ” she asked him, looking 
up from where she leaned back in the low couch into whose 
depth she had sunk as he had spoken. 

“ You did not send me these? Hot as payment for the chess 
service ? ” 

“ Assuredly not. After what you said the other day, I should 
have scarcely been so ill-bred and so heedless of inflicting pain. 
Who used my name thus ? ” 

His face lightened with a pleasure and a relief that changed 
it wonderfully; that brighter look of gladness had been a 
stranger to it for so many years. 

“ You give me infinite happiness, madame. You little dream 
how bitter such slights are where one has lost the power to re- 
sent them! It was M. de Chateauroy, who this morning ” 

“ Dared to tell you I sent you those coihs ? ” 

The serenity of a courtly woman of the world was unbroken, 
but her blue and brilliant eyes darkened and gleamed beneath 
the sweep of their lashes. 

“Perhaps I can scarcely say so much. He gave them, and 
he implied that he gave them from you. The words he spoke 
were these.” 

He told her them as they had been uttered, adding no more; 
she saw the construction they had been intended to bear, and 
that which they had borne naturally to his ear; she listened 
earnestly to the end. Then she turned to him with the ex- 
quisite softness of grace which, when she was moved to it, con- 
trasted so vividly with the haughty and almost chill languor of 
her habitual manner. 

“ Believe me, I regret deeply that you should have been 
wounded by this most coarse indignity; I grieve sincerely that 
through myself in any way it should have been brought upon 
you. As for the perpetrator of it, M. de Chateauroy will be re- 


374 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


ceived here no more; and it shall be my care that*he learns 
not only how I resent his unpardonable use of my name, but 
how I esteem his cruel outrage to a defender of his own Flag. 
You did exceedingly well and wisely to acquaint me; in your 
treatment of it as an affront that I was without warrant to offer 
you, you showed the just indignation of a soldier, and — of what 
I am very sure that you are — a gentleman.” 

He bowed low before her. 

“ Madame, you have made me the debtor of my enemy’s out- 
rage. Those words from you are more than sufficient com- 
pensation for it.” 

“A poor one, I fear! Your Colonel is your enemy, then? 
And wherefore ? ” 

He paused a moment. 

“ Why, at first, I scarcely know. We are antagonistic, I 
suppose.” 

“ But is it usual for officers of his high grade to show such 
malice to their soldiers ? ” 

“ Most unusual. In this service especially so ; although of- 
ficers rising from the ranks themselves are more apt to contract 
prejudices and ill feeling against, as they are to feel favoritism 
to, their men, than where they enter the regiment in a superior 
grade at once. At least, that is the opinion I myself have 
formed ; studying the working of the different systems.” 

“You know the English service, then?” 

“ I know something of it.” 

“ And still, though thinking this, you prefer the French ? ” 

“ I distinctly prefer it, as one that knows how to make fine 
soldiers and how to reward them; as one in which a brave man 
will be valued, and a worn-out veteran will not be left to die 
like a horse at a knacker’s.” 

“ A brave man valued, and yet you are a corporal ! ” thought 
Miladi, as he pursued: 

“ Since I am here, madame, let me thank you, in the Army’s 
name, for your infinite goodness in acting so munificently on 
my slight hint. Your generosity has made many happy hearts 
in the hospital.” 

“ Generosity ! Oh, do not call it by any such name ! What 
did it cost me? We are terribly selfish here. I am indebted to 
you that for once you made me remember those who suffered.” 

She spoke with a certain impulse of candor and of self- 
accusation that broke with great sweetness the somewhat care- 


375 


u MIL ADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS.” 

less coldness of her general manner ; it was like a gleam of light 
that showed all the depth and the warmth that in truth lay 
beneath that imperious languor of habit. It broke further the 
ice of distance that severed the grande dame from the cavalry 
soldier. 

Insensibly to himself, the knowledge that he had, in fact, the 
right to stand before her as an equal gave him the bearing of 
one who exercised that right, and her rapid perception had 
felt before now that this Roumi of Africa was as true a gentle- 
man as any that had ever thronged about her in palaces. Her 
own life had been an uninterrupted course of luxury, pros- 
perity, serenity, and power; the adversity which she could not 
but perceive had weighed on his had a strange interest to her. 
She had heard of many calamities, and aided many; but they 
had always been far sundered from her, they had never touched 
her; in this man’s presence they seemed to grow very close, ter- 
ribly real. She led him on to speak of his comrades, of his 
daily life, of his harassing routine of duties in peace, and of his 
various experiences in war. He told her, too, of Leon Ramon’s 
history; and as she listened, he saw a mist arise and dim the 
brilliancy of those eyes that men complained would never soften. 
The very fidelity with which he sketched to her the bitter suf- 
ferings and the rough nobility that were momentarily borne 
and seen in that great military family of which he had become 
a son by adoption, interested her by its very unlikeness to any- 
thing in her own world. 

His voice had still its old sweetness, his manner still its old 
grace; and added to these were a grave earnestness and a nat- 
ural eloquence that the darkness of his own fortunes, and the 
sympathies with others that pain had awakened, had brought to 
him. He wholly forgot their respective stations; he only re- 
membered that for the first time for so many years he had the 
charm of converse with a woman of high breeding, of inex- 
pressible beauty, and of keen and delicate intuition. He wholly 
forgot how time passed, and she did not seek to remind him; 
indeed, she but little noted it herself. 

At last the conversation turned back to his Chief. 

“You seem to be aware of some motive for your com- 
mandant’s dislike ? ” she asked him. “ Tell me to what you 
attribute it ? ” 

“It is a long tale, madame.” 

“Ho matter; I would hear it.” 


376 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ I fear it would only weary you.” 

“ Do not fear that. Tell it me ? ” 

He obeyed, and told to her the story of the Emir and of the 
Pearl of the Desert; and Yenetia Corona listened, as she had 
listened to him throughout, with an interest that she rarely 
vouchsafed to the recitals and the witticisms of her own circle. 
He gave to the narrative a soldierly simplicity and a picturesque 
coloring that lent a new interest to her; and she was of that 
nature which, however, it may be led to conceal feeling from 
pride and from hatred, never fails to awaken to indignant sym- 
pathy at wrong. 

“ This barbarian is your chief ! ” she said, as the tale closed. 
“ His enmity is your honor ! I can well credit that he will 
never pardon your having stood between him and his crime.” 

“ He has never pardoned it yet, of a surety.” 

“ I will not tell you it was a noble action,” she said, with 
a smile sweet as the morning — a smile that few saw light on 
them. “ It came too naturally to a man of honor for you to 
care for the epithet. Yet it was a great one, a most generous 
one. But I have not heard one thing: what argument did you 
use to obtain her release ? ” 

“ Ho one has ever heard it,” he answered her, while his voice 
sank low. “ I will trust you with it ; it will not pass elsewhere. 
I told him enough of — of my own past life to show him that 
I knew what his had been, and that I knew, moreover, though 
they were dead to me now, men in that greater world of Eu- 
rope who would believe my statement if I wrote them this out- 
rage on the Emir, and would avenge it for the reputation of 
the Empire. And unless he released the Emir’s wife, I swore to 
him that I would so write, though he had me shot on the mor- 
row; and he knew I should keep my word.” 

She was silent some moments, looking on him with a musing 
gaze, in which some pity and more honor for him were blended. 

“You told him your past. Will you confess it to me?” 

“ I cannot, madame.” 

“ And why ? ” 

“ Because I am dead ! Because, in your presence, it becomes 
more bitter to me to remember that I ever lived.” 

“ You speak strangely. Cannot your life have a resurrec- 
tion ? ” 

“ Never, madame. For a brief hour you have given it one — 
in dreams. It will have no other.” 


377 


“ MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS.” 

“ But surely there may be ways — such a story as you have 
told me brought to the Emperor’s knowledge, you would see 
your enemy disgraced, yourself honored ? ” 

“ Possibly, madame. But it is out of the question that it 
should ever be so brought. As I am now, so I desire to live 
and die.” 

“ You voluntarily condemn yourself to this? ” 

“ I have voluntarily chosen it. I am well sure that the 
silence I entreat will be kept by you ? ” 

“ Assuredly; unless by your wish it be broken. Yet — I await 
my brother’s arrival here; he is a soldier himself; I shall hope 
that he will persuade you to think differently of your future. 
At any rate, both his and my own influence will always be ex- 
erted for you, if you will avail yourself of it.” 

“You do me much honor, madame. All I will ever ask of 
you is to return those coins to my Colonel, and to forget that 
your gentleness has made me forget, for one merciful half 
hour, the sufferance on which alone a trooper can present him- 
self here.” 

He swept the ground with his kepi as though it were the 
plumed hat of a Marshal, and backed slowly from Her presence, 
as he had many a time long before backed out of a throne-room. 

As he went, his eyes caught the armies of the ivory chess- 
men; they stood under glass, and had not been broken by her 
lapdog. 

Miladi, left alone there in her luxurious morning room, sat 
a while lost in thought. He attracted her ; he interested her ; he 
aroused her sympathy and her wonder as the men of her own 
world had failed to do — aroused them despite the pride which 
made her impatient of lending so much attention to a mere 
Chasseur d’Afrique. His knowledge of the fact that he was in 
reality the representative of his race, although the power to 
declare himself so had been forever abandoned and lost, had 
given him in her presence that day a certain melancholy, and 
a certain grave dignity that would have shown a far more super- 
ficial observer than she was that he had come of a great race, 
and had memories that were of a very different hue to the 
coarse and hard life which he led now. She had seen much of 
the world, and was naturally far more penetrative and more 
correct in judgment than are most women. She discovered the 
ring of true gold in his words, and the carriage of pure breed- 
ing in his actions. He interested her more than it pleased her 


378 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


that he should. A man so utterly beneath her; doubtless 
brought into the grade to which he had fallen by every kind- 
of error, of improvidence, of folly — of probably worse than 
folly! 

It was too absurd that she, so difficult to interest, so inaccessi- 
ble, so fastidious, so satiated with all that was brilliant and 
celebrated, should find herself seriously spending her thoughts, 
her pity, and her speculation on an adventurer of the African 
Army ! She laughed a little at herself as she stretched out her 
hand for a new volume of French poems dedicated to her by 
their accomplished writer, who was a Parisian diplomatist. 

“ One would imagine I was just out of a convent, and weav- 
ing a marvelous romance from a mystery and a tristesse, be- 
cause the first soldier I notice in Algieria has a gentleman’s 
voice and is ill treated by his officers ! ” she thought with a 
smile, while she opened the poems which had that day arrived, 
radiant in the creamy vellum, the white velvet, and the gold 
of a dedication copy, with the coronet of the Corona d’Amagiie 
on their binding. The poems were sparkling with all the grace 
of airy vers de societe and elegant silvery harmonies; but they 
served ill to chain her attention, for while she read her eyes 
wandered at intervals to the chess battalions. 

“ Such a man as that buried in the ranks of this brutalized 
army ! ” she mused. “ What fatal chance could bring him here ? 
Misfortune, not misconduct, surely. I wonder if Lyon could 
learn ? He shall try.” 

“Your Chasseur has the air of a Prince, my love,” said a 
voice behind her. 

“ Equivocal compliment ! A much better air than most 
Princes,” said Mme. Corona, glancing up with a slight shrug 
of her shoulders, as her guest and traveling companion, the 
Marquise de Renardiere, entered. 

“ Indeed ! I saw him as he passed out ; and he saluted me 
as if he had been a Marshal. Why did he come ? ” 

Venetia Corona pointed to the Napoleons, and told the story; 
rather listlessly and briefly. 

“ Ah ! The man has been a gentleman, I dare say. So many 
of them come to our army. I remember General Villefleur’s 
telling me — he commanded here a while — that the ranks of the 
Zephyrs and Zouaves were full of well-born men, utterly good- 
fpr-nothing, the handsomest scoundrels possible; who had every 
gift and every grace, and yet come to no better end than a 


“MIL ADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS.” 379 

pistol-shot in a ditch or a mortal thrust from Bedouin steel. I 
dare say your Corporal is one of them.” 

“ It may be so.” 

“ But you doubt it, I imagine.” 

“ I am not sure now that I do. But this person is certainly 
unlike a man to whom disgrace has ever attached.” 

“ You think your protege, then, has become what he is 
through adversity, I suppose? Very interesting!” 

“ I really can tell you nothing of his antecedents. Through 
his skill at sculpture, and my notice of it, considerable indignity 
has been brought upon him; and a soldier can feel, it seems, 
though it is very absurd that he should! That is all my con- 
cern with the matter, except that I have to teach his com- 
mander not to play with my name in his barrack yard.” 

She spoke with that negligence which always sounded very 
cold, though the words were so gently spoken. Her best and 
most familiar friends always knew when, with that courtly 
chillness, she had signed them their line of demarcation. 

And the Marquise de Benardiere said no more, but talked 
of the Ambassador’s poems. 


CHAPTER XXV. 


“le bon zig.” 

Meanwhile the subject of their first discourse returned to 
the Chambree. 

He had encouraged the men to pursue those various indus- 
tries and ingenuities, which, though they are affectedly con- 
sidered against “ discipline,” formed, as he knew well, the best 
preservative from real insubordination, and the best instrument 
in humanizing and ameliorating the condition of his comrades. 
The habit of application alone was something gained; and 
if it kept them only for a while from the haunts of those 
coarsest debaucheries which are the only possible form in which 
the soldier can pursue the forbidden license of vice, it was 
better than that leisure should be spent in that joyless bestiality 
which made Cecil, once used to every refinement of luxury and 
indulgence, sicken with a pitying wonder for those who found 
in it the only shape they knew of “ pleasure.” 

He had seen from the first, in many men of his tribu, capabili- 
ties that might be turned to endless uses; in the conscript 
drawn from the populace of the provinces there was almost al- 
ways a knowledge of self-help, and often of some trade, coupled 
with habits of diligence; in the soldier made from the street 
Arab of Paris there were always inconceivable intelligence, 
rapidity of wit, and plastic vivacity; in the adventurers come, 
like himself, from higher grades of society, and burying a 
broken career under the shelter of the tricolor, there were con- 
tinually gifts and acquirements, and even genius, that had 
run to seed and brought forth no fruit. Of all these France al- 
ways avails herself in a great degree; but, as far as Cecil’s 
influence extended, they were developed much more than usual. 
As his own character gradually changed under the force of 
fate, the desire for some interest in life grew on him (every 
man, save one absolutely brainless and self -engrossed, feels this 
sooner or later) ; and that interest he found, or rather created, 
in his regiment. All that he could do to contribute to its 
efficiency in the field he did; all that he could do to further its 
internal excellence he did likewise. 


381 


“le bon zig.” 

Coarseness perceptibly abated, and violence became much 
rarer in that portion of his corps with which he had immedi- 
ately to do; the men gradually acquired from him a better, a 
higher tone; they learned to do duties inglorious and distaste- 
ful as well as they did those which led them to the danger and 
the excitation that they loved; and, having their good faith 
and sympathy, heart and soul, with him, he met, in these law- 
less leopards of African France, with loyalty, courage, gen- 
erosity, and self-abnegation far surpassing those which he had 
ever met with in the polished civilization of his early experi- 
ence. 

For their sakes, he spent many of his free hours in the 
Chambree. Many a man, seeing him there, came and worked 
at some ingenious design, instead of going off to burn his brains 
out with brandy, if he had sous enough to buy any, or to do 
some dexterous bit of thieving on a native, if he had not. Many 
a time knowing him to be there sufficed to restrain the talk 
around from lewdness and from ribaldry, and turn it into chan- 
nels at once less loathsome and more mirthful, because they felt 
that obscenity and vulgarity were alike jarring on his ear, al- 
though he had never more than tacitly shown that they were 
so. A precisian would have been covered with their contumely 
and ridicule; a saint would have been driven out from their 
midst with every missile merciless tongues and merciless hands 
could pelt with; a martinet would have been cursed aloud, and 
cheated, flouted, rebelled against, on every possible occasion. 
But the man who was “ one of them ” entirely, while yet simply 
and thoroughly a gentleman, had great influence — an influence 
exclusively for good. 

The Chambree was empty when he returned; the men were 
scattered over the town in one of their scant pauses of liberty; 
there was only the dog of the regiment, Flick-Flack, a snow- 
white poodle, asleep in the heat, on a sack, who, without wak- 
ing, moved his tail in a sign of gratification as Cecil stroked 
him and sat down near; betaking himself to the work he had 
in hand. 

It was a stone for the grave of Leon Ramon. There was 
no other to remember the dead Chasseur; no other beside him- 
self, save an old woman sitting spinning at her wheel under 
the low-sloping, shingle roof of a cottage by the western Bis- 
cayan sea, who, as she spun, and as the thread flew, looked with 
anxious, aged eyes over the purple waves where she had seen 


382 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


his father — the son of her youth — go down beneath the waters, 
and murmured ever and again, “ II r’viendra ! il r’viendra ! ” 

But the thread of her flax would be spun out, and the thread 
of her waning life be broken, ere ever the soldier for whom 
she watched would go back to her and to Languedoc. 

For life is brutal; and to none so brutal as to the aged who 
remember so well, and yet are forgotten as though already they 
were amid the dead. 

Cecil’s hand pressed the graver along the letters, but his 
thoughts wandered far from the place where he was. Alone 
there, in the great sun-scorched barragk room, the news that 
he had read, the presence he had quitted, seemed like a 
dream. 

He had never known fully all that he had lost until he had 
stood before the beauty of this woman, in whose deep imperial 
eyes the light of other years seemed to lie; the memories of 
other worlds seemed to slumber. 

These blue, proud, fathomless eyes! Why had they looked 
on him? He had grown content with his fate; he had been 
satisfied to live and to fall a soldier of France; he had set 
a seal on that far-off life of his earlier time, and had grown 
to forget that it had ever been. Why had chance flung him 
in her way that, with one careless, haughty glance, one smile 
of courteous pity, she should have undone in a moment all the 
work of a half-score years, and shattered in a day the serenity 
which it had cost him such weary self-contest, such hard- 
fought victory, to attain? 

She had come to pain, to weaken, to disturb, to influence him, 
to shadow his peace, to wring his pride, to unman his resolve, 
as women do mostly with men. Was life not hard enough here 
already, that she must make it more bitter yet to bear? 

He had been content, with a soldier’s contentment, in danger 
and in duty; and she must waken the old coiled serpent of 
restless, stinging regret which he had thought lulled to rest 
forever ! 

“ If I had my heritage ! ” he thought ; and the chisel fell from 
his hands as he looked down the length of the barrack room 
with the blue glare of the African sky through the casement. 

Then he smiled at his own folly, in dreaming idly thus of 
things that might have been. 

“ I will see her no more,” he said to himself. “ If I do not 
take care, I shall end by thinking myself a martyr — the last 


“le bon zig.” 383 

refuge and consolation of emasculate vanity, of impotent 
egotism ! ” 

For though his whole existence was a sacrifice, it never oc- 
curred to him that there was anything whatever great in its 
acceptation, or unjust in its endurance. He thought too little 
of his life’s value, or of its deserts, even to consider by any 
chance that it had been harshly dealt with, or unmeritedlv 
visited. 

At that instant Petit Picpon’s keen, pale, Parisian face 
peered through the door; his great, black eyes, that at times had 
so pathetic a melancholy, and at others such a monkeyish mirth 
and malice, were sparkling excitedly and gleefully. 

“ Mon Caporal ! ” 

“ You, Picpon ! What is it ? ” 

“Mon Caporal, there is great news. La danse commence 
la-bas.” * 

“ Ah ! Are you sure ? ” 

“ Sure, mon Caporal. The Arbicos want a fantasia a la 
clarinette.f We are not to know just yet; we are to have the 
ordre de route to-morrow. I overheard our officers say so. 
They think we shall have brisk work. And for that they will 
not punish the viaille lame.” 

“Punish! Is there fresh disobedience? In my squadron; 
in my absence ? ” 

He rose instinctively, buckling on the sword which he had 
put aside. 

^ Hot in your tribu, mon Caporal,” said Picpon quickly. “ It 
is not much, either. Only the bon zig Rac.” 

“ Rake? What has he been doing? ” 

There was infinite anxiety and vexation in his voice. Rake 
had recently been changed into another squadron of the regi- 
ment, to his great loss and regret; for not only did he miss the 
man’s bright face and familiar voice from the Chambree, but 
he had much disquietude on the score of his safety, for Rake 
was an incorrigible pratique, had only been kept from scrapes 
and mischief by Cecil’s influence, and even despite that had 
been often in hot water, and once even had been drafted for 
a year or so of chastisement among the “ Zephyrs,” a mode 
of punishment which, but for its separation of him from his 

* “There is fighting broken out yonder.” 
t A skirmish to the music of musketry. 


384 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


idol, would have given unmitigated delight to the audacious 
offender. 

“ Very little, mon Caporal! ” said Picpon eagerly. “ A mere 
nothing — a bagatelle! Run a Spahi through the stomach, that 
is all. I don’t think the man is so much as dead, even ! ” 

“I hope not, indeed. When will you cease this brawling 
among yourselves? A soldier’s blade should never be turned 
upon men of his own army. How did it happen ? ” 

“ Pour si peu de chose, mon Caporal. A woman ! They 
quarreled about a little fruit-seller. The homard * was in fault. 
‘ Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort ’ was there before him ; and was pre- 
ferred by the girl; and women should be allowed something 
to do with choosing their lovers, that I think, though it is true 
they often take the worst man. They quarreled; the homard 
drew first; and then, pouf et passe! quick as thought, Rac 
lunged through him. He has always a most beautiful stroke. 
Le Capitaine Argentier was passing, and made a fuss; else 
nothing would have been done. They have put him under 
arrest; but I heard them say they would let him free to-night 
because we should march at dawn.” 

“ I will go and see him at once.” 

“Wait, mon Caporal; I have something to tell you,” said 
Picpon quickly. “ The zig has a motive in what he does. 
Rac wanted to get the trou.f He has done more than one bit 
of mischief only for that.” 

“ Only for what ? He cannot be in love with the trou ? ” 

“ It serves his turn,” said Picpon mysteriously. “ Did you 
never guess why, mon Caporal? Well, I have. ‘ Crache-au- 
nez-d’la-Mort ’ is a risquetout. \ The officers know it ; the 
oureaus know it. He would have mounted, mounted, mounted, 
and been a Captain long before now, if he had not been a 
pratique.” 

“ I know that ; so would many of you.” 

“ Ah, mon Caporal; but that is just what Rac does not choose. 
In the books his page beats every man’s, except yours. They 
have talked of him many times for the cross and for promo- 
tion; but whenever they do — cri-crac! he goes off to a bit of 
mischief, and gets himself punished. Any rabiat,§ long or 
short, serves his purpose. They think him too wild to take out 
of the ranks. You remember, mon Caporal, that splendid thing 

* Spahi. t Prison. 

$ A fine fearless soldier. § Term of punishment. 


385 


“le bon zig.” 

that he did five years ago at Sabasasta? Well, you know they 
spoke of promoting him for it, and he would have run up all 
the grades like a squirrel, and died a Kebir,* I dare say. What 
did he do to prevent it? Why, went that escapade into Oran 
disguised as a Dervish, and got the trou instead.” 

“ To prevent it? Not purposely? ” 

“ Purposely, mon Caporal,” said Petit Picpon, with a sapient 
nod that spoke volumes. “ He always does something when 
he thinks promotion is coming — something to get himself out 
of its way, do you see? And the reason is this: ’tis a good 
zig, and loves you, and will not be put over your head. ‘ Me rise 
afore him ? ’ said the zig to me once. ‘ I’ll have the As de 
pique f on my collar fifty times over first ! He’s a Prince, and 
I’m a mongrel got in a gutter! I owe him more’n I’ll ever 
pay, and I’ll kill the Kebir himself afore I’ll insult him that 
way.’ So say little to him about the Spahi, mon Caporal. 
He loves you well, does your Rac.” 

“Well, indeed! Good God! what nobility!” 

Picpon glanced at him; then, with the tact of his nation, 
glided away and busied himself teaching Flick-Flack to 
shoulder and present arms, the weapon being a long chibouque- 
stick. 

“ After all, Diderot was in the right when he told Rousseau 
w'hich side of the question to take,” mused Cecil, as he crossed 
the barrack-yard a few minutes later to visit the incarcerated 
pratique. “ On my life, civilization develops comfort, but I 
do believe it kills nobility. Individuality dies in it, and egotism 
grows strong and specious. Why is it that in a polished life 
a man, while becoming incapable of sinking to crime, almost 
always becomes also incapable of rising to greatness? Why is 
it that misery, tumult, privation, bloodshed, famine, beget, in 
such a life as this, such countless things of heroism, of en- 
durance, of self-sacrifice — things worthy of demigods — in men 
who quarrel with the wolves for a wild-boar’s carcass, for a 
sheep’s offal ? ” 

A question which perplexes, very wearily, thinkers who have 
more time, more subtlety, and more logic to bring to its un- 
ravelment than Bertie had either leisure or inclination to do. 

“ Is this true, Rake — that you intentionally commit these 

* General. 

+ A little mark in black cloth that distinguishes the battalion of the 
“Incorrigibles.” 


386 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


freaks of misconduct to escape promotion ? ” he asked of the 
man when he stood alone with him in his place of confine- 
ment. 

Rake flushed a little. 

“Mischief’s bred in me, sir; it must come out. It’s just bot- 
tled up in me like ale; if I didn’t take the cork out now and 
then, I should fly apieces ! ” 

“ But many a time when you have been close on the reward 
of your splendid gallantry in the field, you have frustrated 
your own fortunes and the wishes of your superiors by wantonly 
proving yourself unfit for the higher grade they were going to 
raise you to. Why do you do that ? ” 

Rake fidgeted restlessly, and, to avoid the awkwardness of 
the question, replied, like a Parliamentary orator, by a flow of 
rhetoric. 

“ Sir, there’s a many chaps like me. They can’t help nohow 
bustin’ out when the fit takes ’em. ’Taint reasonable to blame 
’em for it; they’re just made so, like a chestnut’s made to bust 
its pod, and a chicken to bust its shell. Well, you see, sir, 
Prance she know that, and she say to herself, ‘ Here are these 
madcaps; if I keep ’em tight in hand I shan’t do nothin’ with 
’em — they’ll turn obstreperous and cram my convict-cells. Now 
I want soldiers, I don’t want convicts. I can’t let ’em stay in 
the Regulars, ’cause they’ll be for making all the army wildfire 
like ’em; I’ll just draft ’em by theirselves, treat ’em different, 
and let ’em fire away. They’ve got good stuff in ’em, though 
too much of the curb riles ’em.’ Well, sir, she do that; and 
aren’t the Zephyrs as fine a lot of fellows as any in the service? 
Of course they are; but if they’d been in England — God bless 

her, the dear old d d obstinate soul! — they’d have been 

druv’ crazy along o’ pipeclay and razors; she’d never have seed 
what was in ’em, her eyes are so bunged up with routine. If 
a pup riot in the pack, she’s no notion but to double-thong 
him, and, a-course, in double-quick time, she finds herself 
obliged to go further and hang him. She don’t ever remember 
that it may be only just along of his breedin’, and that he may 
make a very good hound elseways let out a bit, though he’ll 
spile the whole pack if she will be a fool and try to make a 
steady line-hunter of him,, straight agin his nature.” 

Rake stopped, breathless in his rhetoric, which contained 
more truth in it, as also more roughness, than most rhetoric 
does. 


•“le bon zig.” 387 

“ You are right. But you wander from my question,” said 
Cecil gently. “ Do you avoid promotion ? ” 

“Yes, sir; I do,” said Bake, something sulkily; for he felt 
he was being driven “ up a corner.” “ I do. I aint not one 
bit fitter for an officer than that rioting pup I talk on is fit to 
lead them crack packs at home. I should be in a strait-waist- 
coat if I was promoted; and as for the cross — Lord, sir, that 
would get me into a world o’ trouble! I should pawn it for a 
toss of wine the first day out, or give it to the first moukiera 
that winked her black eye for it ! The star put on my buttons 
suits me a deal better ; if you’ll believe me, sir, it do.” * 

Cecil’s eyes rested on him with a look that said far more 
than his answer. 

“ Rake, I know you better than you would let me do, if you 
had your way. My noble fellow! you reject advancement, and 
earn yourself an unjust reputation for mutinous conduct, be- 
cause you are too generous to be given a step above mine in the 
regiment.” 

“ Who’s a been a-tellin’ you that trash, sir ? ” retorted Rake, 
with ferocity. 

“No matter who. It is no trash. It is a splendid loyalty 
of which I am utterly unworthy, and it shall be my care that 
it is known at the Bureaus, so that henceforth your great 
merits may be ” 

“ Stow that, sir ! ” cried Rake vehemently. “ Stow that, if 
you please ! Promoted I won’t be — no, not if the Emperor hisself 
was to order it, and come across here to see it done! A pretty 
thing, surely! Me a officer, and you never a one — me a-com- 
mandin’ of you, and you a-salutin’ of me! By the Lord, sir! 
we might as well see the camp-scullions a-ridin’ in state, and 
the Marshals a-scouring out the soup^pots ! ” 

“Not at all. This Army has not a finer soldier than your- 
self; you have a right to the reward of your services in it. 
And I assure you you do me a great injustice if you think I 
would not as willingly go out under your orders as under those 
of all the Marshals of the Empire.” 

The tears rushed into the hardy eyes of the redoubtable 
“ Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort,” though he dashed them away in a 
fury of eloquence. 

“ Sir, if you don’t understand as how you’ve given me a 
power more than all the crosses in the world in saying of them 
*The star on the metal buttons of the insubordinates, or Zephyrs. 


✓ 


388 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


there words, why, you don’t know me much either, that’s all. 
You’re a gentleman — a right on rare thing that is — and, bein’ 
a gentleman, a-course you’d be too generous and too groud like 
not to behave well to me, whether I was a-servin’ you as I’ve 
always served you, or a-insultin’ of you by ridin’ over your head 
in that way as we’re speakin’ on. But I know my place, sir, and 
I know yours. If it wasn’t for that ere Black Hawk — damn 
him! — I can’t help it, sir; I will damn him, if he shoot me for 
it — you’d been a Chef d’Escadron by now. There aint the 
leastest doubt of it. Ask all the zigs what they think. Well, 
sir, now you know I’m a man what do as I say. If you don’t 
let me have my own way, and if you do the littlest thing to 
get me a step, why, sir, I swear, as I’m a livin’ bein’, that I’ll 
draw on Chateauroy the first time I see him afterwards, and slit 
his throat as I’d slit a jackal’s! There — my oath’s took!” 

And Cecil saw that it would also be kept. The natural law- 
lessness and fiery passion inborn in Rake had of course not been 
cooled by the teaching of African warfare; and his hate was 
intense against the all-potent Chief of his regiment; as in- 
tense as the love he bore to the man whom he had followed out 
into exile. 

Cecil tried vainly to argue with him; all his reasonings fell 
like hailstones on a cuirass, and made no more impression; he 
was resolute. 

“ But listen to one thing,” he urged at last. “ Can you not 
see how you pain me by this self-sacrifice? If I knew that 
you had attained a higher grade, and wore your epaulettes 
in this service, can you not fancy I should feel pleasure then 
(as I feel regret, even remorse, now) that I brought you to 
Africa through my own follies and misfortunes ? ” 

“ Do you, sir ? There aint the least cause for it, then,” re- 
turned Rake sturdily. “ Lor’ bless you, sir ; why, this life’s made 
a-purpose for me! If ever a round peg went trim and neat into 
a round hole, it was when I came into this here Army. I never 
was so happy in all my days before. They’re right on good 
fellows, and ’ll back you to the death if so be as you’ve allays 
been share-and-share-alike with ’em, as a zig should. As a 
private, sir, I’m happy and I’m safe; as a officer, I should be 
kicking over the traces, and blunderin’ everlastingly. How- 
ever, there aint no need to say a word more about it; I’ve 
sworn, and you’ve heerd me swear, sir, and you know as how I 
shall keep my oath if ever I’m provoked to it by bein’ took 


389 


“le bon zig.” 

notice of. I stuck that homard just now just by way of a 
lark, and only ’cause he come where he’d no business to poke 
his turbaned old pate; ’taint likely as I shall stop at givin’ 
the Hawk two inches of steel if he comes such a insult over us 
both as to offer a blackguard like me the epaulettes as you 
ought to be a-wearin’ ! ” 

And Cecil knew that it was hopeless either to persuade him 
to his own advantage or to convince him of his disobedience in 
speaking thus of his supreme, before his non-commissioned, 
officer. He was himself, moreover, deeply moved by the man’s 
fidelity. 

He stretched his hand out. 

“ I wish there were more blackguards with hearts like yours. 
I cannot repay your love, Rake, but I can value it.” 

Rake put his own hands behind his back. 

“God bless you, sir; you’ve repaid it ten dozen times ‘over. 
But you shan’t do that, sir. I told you long ago, I’m too much 
of a scamp! Some day, p’rhaps, as I said, when I’ve settled 
scores with myself, and wiped off all the bad ’uns with a clear 
sweep, tolerably clean. Hot afore, sir!” 

And Rake was too sturdily obstinate not to always carry his 
point. 

The love that he bore to Cecil was very much such a wild, 
chivalric, romantic fidelity as the Cavaliers or the Gentlemen 
of the Horth bore to their Stuart idols. That his benefactor 
had become a soldier of Africa in no way lessened the reverent 
love of his loyalty, any more than theirs was lessened by the 
adversities of their royal masters. Like theirs, also, it had 
beauty in its blindness — the beauty that lies in every pure un- 
selfishness. 

Meanwhile, Picpon’s news was correct. 

The regiment was ordered out a la danse.* There was fresh 
war in the interior ; and wherever there was the hottest 
slaughter, there the Black Hawk always flew down with his 
falcon-flock. When Cecil left his incorrigible zig, the trumpets 
were sounding an assembly ; there were noise, tumult, eagerness, 
excitement, delighted zest on every side; a general order was 
read to the enraptured squadrons; they were to leave the town 
at the first streak of dawn. 

There were before them death, deprivation, long days of 
famine, long days of drought and thirst; parching, sun-baked 
* On the march. 


390 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


roads ; bitter, chilly nights ; fiery furnace-blasts of sirocco ; kill- 
ing, pitiless, northern winds; hunger, only sharpened by a 
snatch of raw meat or a handful of maize ; and the probabilities, 
ten to one, of being thrust under the sand to rot, or left to have 
their skeletons picked clean by the vultures. But what of that ? 
There were also the wild delight of combat, the freedom of 
lawless warfare, the joy of deep strokes thrust home, the chance 
of plunder, of wine-skins, of cattle, of women; above all, that 
lust for slaughter which burns so deep down in the hidden souls 
of men and gives them such brotherhood with wolf and vulture 
and tiger, when once its flame bursts forth. 

That evening, at the Villa Aioussa, there gathered a courtly 
assembly, of much higher rank than Algiers can commonly 
afford, because many of station as lofty as her own had been 
drawn thither to follow her to what the Princess Corona called 
her banishment — an endurable banishment enough under those 
azure skies, in that clear elastic air, and with that charming 
“ bonbonniere ” in which to dwell, yet still a banishment to the 
reigning beauty of Paris, to one who had the habits and the 
commands of a wholly undisputed sovereignty in the royal 
splendor of her womanhood. 

There was a variety of distractions to prevent ennui; there 
were half a dozen clever Paris actors playing the airiest of 
vaudevilles in the Bijou theater beyond the drawing rooms; 
there were some celebrated Italian singers whom an Imperial 
Prince had brought over in his yacht ; there was the best music ; 
there was wit as well as homage whispered in her ear. Yet she 
was not altogether amused ; she was a little touched with ennui. 

“ Those men are very stupid. They have not half the talent 
of that soldier ! ” she thought once, turning from a Peer of 
Prance, an Austrian Archduke, and a Russian diplomatist. 
And she smiled a little, furling her fan and musing on the 
horror that the triad of fashionable conquerors near her would 
feel if they knew that she thought them duller than an African 
lascar ! 

But they only told her things of which she had been long 
weary, specially of her own beauty; he had told her of things 
totally unknown to her — things real, terrible, vivid, strong, 
sorrowful — strong as life, sorrowful as death. 

“ Chateauroy and his Chasseurs have an ordre de route,” a 
voice was saying, that moment, behind her chair. 


LE BON ZIG. 


a 


77 


391 


“ Indeed ? ” said another. “ The Black Hawk is never so 
happy as when unhooded. When do they go ? ” 

“ To-morrow. At dawn.” 

“ There is always fighting here, I suppose ? ” 

“ Oh, yes! The losses in men are immense; only the journals 
would get a communique, or worse, if they ventured to say so 
in France. How delicious La Doche is! She comes in again 
with the next scene.” 

The Princess Corona listened; and her attention wandered 
farther from the Archduke, the Peer, and the diplomatist, as 
from the Vaudeville. She did not find Mme. Doche very charm- 
ing; and she was absorbed for a time looking at the miniatures 
on her fan. 


At the same moment, through the lighted streets of Algiers, 
Cigarette, like a union of fairy and of fury, was flying with 
the news. Cigarette had seen the flame of war at its height, 
and had danced in the midst of its whitest heat, as young 
children dance to see the fires leap red in the black winter’s 
night. Cigarette loved the battle, the charge, the wild music of 
bugles, the thunder-tramp of battalions, the sirocco-sweep of 
light squadrons, the mad tarantala of triumph when the 
slaughter was done, the grand swoop of the Eagles down unto 
the carnage, the wild hurrah of France. 

She loved them with all her heart and soul; and she flew 
now through the starlit, sultry night, crying, “ La guerre ! La 
guerre ! La guerre ! ” and chanting to the enraptured soldiery 
a “ Marseillaise ” of her own improvisation, all slang, and dog- 
gerel, and barrack grammar; but fire-giving as a torch, and 
rousing as a bugle in the way she sang it, waving the tricolor 
high over her head : 


“ Fantasia, 

Deo Gratia! 

En avant ! 

On t’attend ! 

An cor et & cri 
Suivez, mes Spahis, 
On Balance & la danse, 

Pour la gloire de la France. 
Fusillons, 
Bataillons ! 

Et marchons 
Au gui Ions ! 

Va, loustic, 


392 


UNDER TWO FLAGS, 


Et du cric 
Vides ton verre, 

A la guerre ! 

C’est l’Amie du Drapeau 
Qui s’appelle son troupeau ! 
Faisons pouff A l’Emir, 

Faisons style k venir, 

De l’avoine la moisson, 

Portera belle boisson, 

Le Zephyr au douar 
F’ra retentir son cor, 
Chasse-marais cont’ fleurettes 
S’emparant des fillettes, 

Et sous l’Aigle mes Roumis, 

Yont gorger les Arbis, 

X la musique si nette 
De la haute clarinette ! 

Razzia, 

Grazia, 

Est ici, 

Mes Spahis, 

A l’amour ! Aux beaux joura ! 
Rataplan des tambours, 

Nous appelle, ‘‘ R’lin tintin, 

Yite au rire, au butin ! ” 

Vive la gloire ! 

Vive le boire ! 

Vive le vin rose du sang ! 

Vive le feu volage des rangs ! 
Vive tout qa qui va nous faire 
Paradis au fond d’enfer, 

Par la Guerre, par la Guerre ! 
En avant ! Alions ! Buvons ! 

En avant ! Alions ! Mourrons ! ** 


CHAPTER XXVI. 


ZARAILA. 

The African day was at its noon. 

From the first break of dawn the battle had raged; now, at 
midday, it was at its height. Far in the interior, almost on 
the edge of the great desert, in that terrible season when air 
that is flame by day is ice by night, and when the scorch of 
a blazing sun may be followed in an hour by the blinding fury 
of a snow-storm, the slaughter had gone on, hour through hour, 
under a shadowless sky, blue as steel, hard as a sheet of brass. 
The Arabs had surprised the French encampment, where it lay 
in the center of an arid plain that was called Zaraila. Hovering 
like a cloud of nawks on the entrance of the Sahara, massed 
together for one mighty, if futile, effort — with all their ancient 
war-lust, and with a new despair — the tribes who refused the 
yoke of the alien empire were once again in arms; were once 
again combined in defense of those limitless kingdoms of drift- 
ing sand, of that beloved belt of bare and desolate land so use- 
less to the conqueror, so dear to the nomad. When they had 
been, as it had been thought, beaten back into the desert wilder- 
ness; when, without water and without cattle, it had been cal- 
culated that they would, of sheer necessity, bow themselves in 
submission, or perish of famine and of thirst; they had recov- 
ered their ardor, their strength, their resistance, their power 
to harass without ceasing, if they could never arrest, the enemy. 
They had cast the torch of war afresh into the land, and here, 
southward, the flame burned bitterly, and with a merciless 
tongue devoured the lives of men, licking them up as a forest 
fire the dry leaves and the touchwood. 

Circling, sweeping, silently, swiftly, with that rapid spring, 
that marvelous whirlwind of force, that is of Africa, and of 
Africa alone, the tribes had rushed down in the darkness of 
night, lightly as a kite rushes through the gloom of the dawn. 
For once the vigilance of the invader served him naught; for 
once the Frankish camp was surprised off its guard. While 
the air was still chilly with the breath of the night, while the 
first gleam of morning had barely broken through the mists 


394 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


of the east, while the picket-fires burned through the dusky 
gloom, and the sentinels and vedettes paced slowly to and fro, 
and circled round, hearing nothing worse than the stealthy 
tread of the jackal, or the muffled flight of a night-bird, afar 
in the south a great dark cloud had risen, darker than the 
brooding shadows of the earth and sky. 

The cloud swept onward, like a mass of cirrhi, in those shad- 
ows shrouded. Fleet as though wind-driven, dense as though 
thunder-charged, it moved over the plains. As it grew nearer 
and nearer, it grew grayer, a changing mass of white and black 
that fused, in the obscurity, into a shadow color; a dense array 
of men and horses flitting noiselessly like spirits, and as though 
guided alone by one rein and moved alone by one breath and 
one will; not a bit champed, not a linen-fold loosened, not a 
shiver of steel was heard ; as silently as the winds of the desert 
sweep up northward over the plains, so they rode now, host upon 
host of the warriors of the soil. 

The outlying vedettes, the advancing sentinels, had scru- 
tinized so long through the night every wavering shade of 
cloud and moving form of buffalo in the dim distance, that their 
sleepless eyes, strained and aching, failed to distinguish this 
moving mass that was so like the brown plains and starless sky 
that it could scarce be told from them. The night, too, was 
bitter; northern cold cut hardly chillier than this that parted 
the blaze of one hot day from the blaze of another. The sea- 
winds were blowing cruelly keen, and men who at noon gladly 
stripped to their shirts, shivered now where they lay under 
canvas. 

Awake -while his comrades slept around him, Cecil was 
stretched, half unharnessed. The foraging duty of the past 
twenty-four hours had been work harassing and heavy, inglori- 
ous and full of fatigue. The country round was bare as a table- 
rock ; the water-courses poor, choked with dust and stones, unfed 
as yet by the rains or snows of the approaching winter. The 
horses suffered sorely, the men scarce less. The hay for the 
former was scant and bad; the rations for the latter often cut 
off by- flying skirmishers of the foe. The campaign, so far 
as it had gone, had been fruitless, yet had cost largely in hu- 
man life. The men died rapidly of dysentery, disease, and the 
chills of the nights, and had severe losses in countless obscure 
skirmishes, that served no end except to water the African soil 
with blood. 


ZARAILA. 


395 


True, France would fill the gaps up as fast as they occurred, 
and the “ Moniteur ” would only allude to the present operations 
when it could give a flourishing line descriptive of the Arabs 
being driven back, decimated, to the borders of the Sahara. But 
as the flourish of the “ Moniteur ” would never reach a thou- 
sand little way-side huts, and sea-side cabins, and vine-dressers’ 
sunny nests, where the memory of some lad who had gone forth 
never to return would leave a deadly shadow athwart the hum- 
ble threshold — so the knowledge that they were only so many 
automata in the hands of government, whose loss would merely 
be noted that it might be efficiently supplied, was not that wine- 
draught of La Gloire which poured the strength and the daring 
of gods into the limbs of the men of Jena and of Austerlitz. 
Still, there was the war-lust in them, and there was the fire of 
France; they fought not less superbly here, where to be food 
for jackal and kite was their likeliest doom, than their sires 
had done under the eagles of the First Empire, when the Con- 
script hero of to-day was the glittering Marshal of to-morrow. 

Cecil had awakened while the camp still slept. Do what he 
would, i ->rce himself into the fullness of this fierce and hard 
existence as he might, he could not burn out or banish a thing 
that had many a time haunted him, but never as it did now — 
the remembrance of a woman. He almost laughed as he lay 
there on a pile of rotting straw, and wrung the truth out of his 
own heart, that he — a soldier of these exiled squadrons — was 
mad enough to love that woman whose deep, proud eyes had 
dwelt with such serene pity upon him. 

Yet his hand clinched on the straw as it had clinched once 
when the operator’s knife had cut down through the bones of 
his breast to reach a bullet that, left in his chest, would have 
been death. If in the sight of men he had only stood in the 
rank that was his by birthright, he could have striven for — it 
might be that he could have roused-^some answering passion in 
her. But that chance was lost to him forever. Well, it was but 
one thing more that was added to all that he had of his own 
will given up. He was dead; he must be content, as the dead 
must be, to leave the warmth of kisses, the glow of delight, the 
possession of a woman’s loveliness, the homage of men’s honor, 
the gladness of successful desires, to those who still lived in the 
light he had quitted. He had never allowed himself the emas- 
culating indulgence of regret ; he flung it off him now. 

Flick-Flack — coiled asleep in his bosom — thrilled, stirred, and 


396 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


growled. He rose, and, with the little dog under his arm, looked 
out from the canvas. He knew that the most vigilant sentry 
in the service had not the instinct for a foe afar off that Flick- 
Flack possessed. He gazed keenly southward, the poodle growl- 
ing on; that cloud so dim, so distant, caught his sight. Was 
it a moving herd, a shifting mist, a shadow-play between the 
night and dawn? 

For a moment longer he watched it; then, what it was he 
knew, or felt by such strong instinct as makes knowledge ; and, 
like the blast of a clarion, his alarm rang over the unarmed and 
slumbering camp. 

An instant, and the hive of men, so still, so motionless, broke 
into violent movement; and from the tents the half-clothed 
sleepers poured, wakened, and fresh in wakening as hounds. 
Perfect discipline did the rest. With marvelous, with match- 
less swiftness and precision they harnessed and got under arms. 
They were but fifteen hundred or so in all — a single squadron of 
Chasseurs, two battalions of Zouaves, half a corps of Tirail- 
leurs, and some Turcos; only a branch of the main body, and 
without artillery. But they were some of the flower of the army 
of Algiers, and they roused in a second, with the vivacious 
ferocity of the bounding tiger, with the glad, eager impatience 
for the slaughter of the unloosed hawk. Yet, rapid in its won- 
drous celerity as their united action was, it was not so rapid 
as the downward sweep of that war-cloud that came so near, 
with the tossing of white draperies and the shine of countless 
sabers, now growing clearer and clearer out of the darkness, 
till, with a whir like the noise of an eagle’s wings, and a swoop 
like an eagle’s seizure, the Arabs whirled down upon them, met 
a few yards in advance by the answering charge of the Light 
Cavalry. 

There was a crash as if rock were hurled upon rock, as the 
Chasseurs, scarce seated in saddle, rushed forward to save the 
pickets; to encounter the first blind force of the attack, and 
to give the infantry, further in, more time for harness and de- 
fense. Out of the caverns of the night an armed multitude 
seemed to have suddenly poured. A moment ago they had 
slept in security ; now thousands on thousands, whom they could 
not number, whom they could but dimly even perceive, were 
thrown on them in immeasurable hosts, which the encircling 
cloud of dust served but to render vaster, ghastlier, and more 
majestic. The Arab line stretched out with wings that seemed 




4 



Photo by Sarony 

















ZARAILA. 


397 


to extend on and on without end; the line of the Chasseurs was 
not one-half its length; they were but a single squadron flung 
in their stirrups, scarcely clothed, knowing only that the foe 
was upon them, caring only that their sword-hands were hard 
on their weapons. With all the elan of France they launched 
themselves forward to break the rush of the desert horses; they 
met with a terrible sound, like falling trees, like clashing 
metal. 

The hoofs of the rearing chargers struck each other’s breasts, 
and these bit and tore at each other’s manes, while their riders 
reeled down dead. Frank and Arab were blent in one inextrica- 
ble mass as the charging squadrons encountered. The outer 
wings of the tribes were spared the shock, and swept on to meet 
the bayonets of Zouaves and Turcos as, at their swift foot- 
gallop, the Enfants Perdus of France threw themselves forward 
from the darkness. The cavalry was enveloped in the over- 
whelming numbers of the center , and ,the flanks seemed to 
cover the Zouaves and Tirailleurs as some great settling mist 
may cover the cattle who move beneath it. 

It was not a battle; it was a frightful tangling of men and 
brutes. Ho contest of modern warfare, such as commences and 
conquers by a duel of artillery, and, sometimes, gives the victory 
to whosoever has the superiority of ordnance, but a conflict, 
hand to hand, breast to breast, life for life; a Homeric .combat 
of spear and of sword even while the first volleys of the answer- 
ing musketry pealed over the plain. 

For once the Desert avenged, in like, that terrible inexhausti- 
bility of supply wherewith the Empire so long had crushed them 
beneath the overwhelming difference of numbers. It was the 
Day of Mazagran once more, as the light of the morning broke 
— gray, silvered, beautiful — in the far, dim distance, beyond the 
tawny seas of reeds. Smoke and sand soon densely rose above 
the struggle, white, hot, blinding ; but out from it the lean, dark 
Bedouin faces, the snowy haicks, the red burnous, the gleam 
of the Tunisian muskets, the flash of the silver-hilted yataghans, 
were seen fused in a mass with the brawny, naked necks of the 
Zouaves, with the shine of the French bayonets; with the toss- 
ing manes and glowing nostrils of the Chasseurs’ horses; with 
the torn, stained silk of the raised Tricolor, through which the 
storm of balls flew thick and fast as hail, yet whose folds were 
never suffered to fall, though again and again the hand that 
held its staff was cut away or was unloosed in death, yet ever 


398 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


found another to take its charge before the Flag could once have 
trembled in the enemy’s sight. 

The Chasseurs could not charge; they were hemmed in, 
packed between bodies of horsemen that pressed them together 
as between iron plates; now and then they could cut their way 
through, clear enough to reach their comrades of the demie 
cavalerie, but as often as they did so, so often the overwhelming 
numbers of the Arabs surged in on them afresh like a flood, 
and closed upon them, and drove them back. 

Every soldier in the squadron that lived kept his life by sheer, 
breathless, ceaseless, hand-to-hand sword-play, hewing right and 
left, front and rear, without pause, as, in the great tangled for- 
ests of the west, men hew aside branch and brushwood ere they 
can force one step forward. 

The gleam of the dawn spread in one golden glow of morn- 
ing, and the day rose radiant over the world; they stayed not 
for its beauty or its .peace; the carnage went on, hour upon 
hour; men began to grow drunk with slaughter as with raki. 
It was sublimely grand; it was hideously hateful — this wild- 
beast struggle, this heaving tumult of striving lives, that ever 
and anon stirred the vast w T ar-cloud of smoke and broke from 
it as the lightning from the night. The sun laughed in its 
warmth over a thousand hills and streams, over the blue seas 
lying northward, and over the yellow sands of the south; but 
the touch of its heat only made the flame in their blood burn 
fiercer ; the fullness of its light only served to show them clearer 
where to strike and how to slay. 

It was bitter, stifling, cruel work; with their mouths choked 
with sand, with their throats caked with thirst, with their eyes 
blind with smoke; cramped as in a vise, scorched with the 
blaze of powder, covered with blood and with dust; while the 
steel was thrust through nerve and sinew, or the shot plowed 
through bone and flesh. The answering fire of the Zouaves and 
Tirailleurs kept the Arabs further at bay, and mowed them 
faster down; but in the Chasseurs’ quarter of the field — parted 
from the rest of their comrades as they had been by the rush 
of that broken charge with which they had sought to save the 
camp and arrest the foe — the worst pressure of the attack was 
felt, and the fiercest of the slaughter fell. 

The Chef d’Escadron had been shot dead as they had first 
swept out to encounter the advance of the desert horsemen ; one 
by one the officers had been cut down, singled out by the keen 


ZARAILA. 


399 


eyes of their enemies, and throwing themselves into the deadli- 
est of the carnage with the impetuous self-devotion character- 
istic of their service. At the last there remained but a mere 
handful out of all the brilliant squadron that had galloped 
down in the gray of the dawn to meet the whirlwind of Arab 
fury. At their head was Cecil. 

Two horses had been killed under him, and he had thrown 
himself afresh across unwounded chargers, whose riders had 
fallen in the melee, and at whose bridles he had caught as he 
shook himself free of the dead animals’ stirrups. His head was 
uncovered; his uniform, hurriedly thrown on, had been torn 
aside, and his chest was bare to the red folds of his sash; he 
■was drenched with blood, not his own, that had rained on him 
as he fought ; and his face and his hands were black with smoke 
and with powder. He could not see a yard in front of him ; he 
could not tell how the day went anywhere, save in that corner 
■where his own troop was hemmed in. As fast as they beat the 
Arabs back, and forced themselves some clearer space, so fast 
the tribes closed in afresh. Ho orders reached him from the 
General of Brigade in command; except for the well-known 
war-shouts of the Zouaves that ever and again rang above the 
din, he could not tell whether the French battalions were not 
cut utterly to pieces under the immense numerical superiority 
of their foes. All he could see was that every officer of Chas- 
seurs was down, and that, unless he took the vacant place, and 
rallied them together, the few score troopers that were still left 
vrould scatter, confused and demoralized, as the best soldiers 
will at times when they can see no chief to follow. 

He spurred the horse he had just mounted against the dense 
crowd opposing him, against the hard, black wall of dust, and 
smoke, and steel, and savage faces, and lean, swarthy arms, 
which were all that his eyes could see, and that seemed im- 
penetrable as granite, moving and changing though it was. He 
thrust the gray against it, while he waved his sword above his 
head. 

“ En avant, mes freres ! France! France! France!” 

His voice — well known, well loved — thrilled the hearts of his 
comrades, and brought them together like a trumpet-call. 
They had gone with him many a time into the hell of battle, 
into the jaws of death. They surged about him now; striking, 
thrusting, forcing, with blows of their sabers or their lances and 
blows of their beasts’ fore-feet, a passage one to another, until 


400 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


they were reunited once more as one troop, while their shrill 
shouts, like an oath of vengeance, echoed after him in the 
defiance that has pealed victorious over so many fields from 
the soldiery of France. They loved him; he had called them 
his brethren. They were like lambs for him to lead, like tigers 
for him to incite. 

They could scarcely see his face in that great red mist of 
combat, in that horrible, stifling pressure on every side that 
jammed them as if they were in a press of iron, and gave them 
no power to pause, though their animals’ hoofs struck the lin- 
gering life out of some half-dead comrade, or trampled over the 
writhing limbs of the brother-in-arms they loved dearest and 
best. But his voice reached them, clear and ringing in its ap- 
peal for sake of the country they never once forgot or once 
reviled, though in her name they were starved and beaten like 
rebellious hounds; though in her cause they were exiled all 
their manhood through under the sun of this cruel, ravenous, 
burning Africa. They could see him lift aloft the Eagle he 
had caught from the last hand that had borne it, the golden 
gleam of the young morning flashing like flame upon the 
brazen wings ; and they shouted, as with one throat, “ Maza- 
gran ! Mazagran ! ” As the battalion of Mazagran had died 
keeping the ground through the whole of the scorching day, 
while the fresh hordes poured down on them like ceaseless tor- 
rents, snow-fed and exhaustless — so they were ready to hold the 
ground here, until of all their numbers there should be left 
not one living man. 

He glanced back on them, guarding his head the while from 
the lances that were rained on him; and he lifted the guidon 
higher and higher, till, out of the ruck and the throng, the 
brazen bird caught afresh the rays of the rising sun. 

“ Suivez-moi ! ” he shouted. 

Then, like arrows launched at once from a hundred bows, they 
charged; he still slightly in advance of them, the bridle flung 
upon his horse’s neck, his head and breast bare, one hand strik- 
ing aside with his blade the steel shafts as they poured on him, 
the other holding high above the press the Eagle of the Bona- 
partes. 

The effort was superb. 

Dense bodies of Arabs parted them in the front from the camp 
where the battle raged, harassed them in the rear with flying 
shots and hurled lances, and forced down on them on either side. 


ZARAILA. 


401 


like the closing jaws of a trap. The impetuosity of their on- 
ward movement was, for the moment, irresistible ; it bore head- 
long all before it; the desert horses recoiled, and the desert 
riders themselves yielded — crushed, staggered, trodden aside, 
struck aside, by the tremendous impetus with which the Chas- 
seurs were thrown upon them. For the moment the Bedouins 
gave way, shaken and confused, as at the head of the French 
they saw this man, with his hair blowing in the wind, and the 
sun on the fairness of his face, ride down on them thus un- 
harmed, though a dozen spears were aimed at his naked breast ; 
dealing strokes sure as death, right and left as he went, with 
the light from the hot, blue skies on the ensign of France that 
he bore. 

They knew him; they had met him in many conflicts; and 
wherever the “ fair Frank,” as they called him, came, there they 
knew of old the battle was hard to win; bitter to the bitterest 
end, whether that end were defeat, or victory costly as defeat 
in its achievement. 

And for the moment they recoiled under the shock of that 
fiery onslaught; for the moment they parted and wavered and 
oscillated beneath the impetus with which he hurled his hun- 
dred Chasseurs on them, with that light, swift, indescribable 
rapidity and resistlessness of attack characteristic of the 
African Cavalry. 

Though a score or more, one on another, had singled him 
out with special and violent attack, he had gone, as yet, un- 
wounded, save for a lance-thrust in his shoulder, of which, in 
the heat of the conflict, he was unconscious. The “ fighting 
fury ” was upon him ; and when once this had been lit in him, 
the Arabs knew of old that the fiercest vulture in the Frankish 
ranks never struck so surely home as this hand that his com- 
rades called “ main de femme, mais main de fer.” 

As he spurred his horse down on them now, twenty blades 
glittered against him; the foremost would have cut straight 
down through the bone of his bared chest and killed him at a 
single lunge, but as its steel flashed in the sun, one of his troop- 
ers threw himself against it, and parried the stroke from him 
by sheathing it in his own breast. The blow was mortal; and 
the one who had saved him reeled down off his saddle under 
the hoofs of the trampling chargers. “ Picpon s’en souvient,” 
he murmured with a smile; and as the charge swept onward, 
Cecil, with a great cry of horror, saw the feet of the maddened 


402 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


horses strike to pulp the writhing body, and saw the black, wist- 
ful eyes of the Enfant de Paris look upward to him once, with 
love, and fealty, and unspeakable sweetness gleaming through 
their darkened sight. 

But to pause was impossible. Though the French horses were 
forced with marvelous dexterity through a bristling forest of 
steel, though the remnant of the once-glittering squadron was 
cast against them in as headlong a daring as if it had half the 
regiments of the Empire at its back, the charge availed little 
against the hosts of the desert that had rallied and swooped 
down afresh almost as soon as they had been, for the instant 
of the shock, panic-stricken. The hatred of the opposed races 
was aroused in all its blind, ravening passion; the conquered 
had the conquering nation for once at their mercy ; for once at 
tremendous disadvantage: on neither side was there aught ex- 
cept that one instinct for slaughter, which, once awakened, kills 
every other in the breast in which it burns. 

The Arabs had cruel years to avenge — years of a loathed 
tyranny, years of starvation and oppression, years of constant 
flight southward, with no choice but submission or death. They 
had deadly memories to wash out — memories of brethren who 
had been killed like carrion by the invaders’ shot and steel; of 
nomadic freedom begrudged and crushed by civilization; of 
young children murdered in the darkness of the caverns, with 
the sulphurous smoke choking the innocent throats that had 
only breathed the golden air of a few summers; of women, well 
beloved, torn from them in the hot flames of burning tents and 
outraged before their eyes with insult whose end was a bayonet- 
thrust into their breasts — breasts whose sin was fidelity to the 
vanquished. 

They had vengeance to do that made every stroke seem 
righteous and holy in their sight; that nerved each of their 
bare and sinewy arms as with the strength of a thousand limbs. 
Right — so barren, so hopeless, so unavailing — had long been 
with them. Now to it was added at last the power of might; 
and they exercised the power with the savage ruthlessness of 
the desert. They closed in on every side; wheeling their swift 
coursers hither and thither; striking with lance and blade; 
hemming in, beyond escape, the doomed fragment of the Frank- 
ish squadron till there remained of them but one small nucleus, 
driver close together, rather as infantry will form than as cav- 
alry usually does — a ring of horsemen, of which every one had 


ZARAILA. 


403 


his face to the foe; a solid circle curiously wedged one against 
the other, with the bodies of chargers and of men deep around 
them, and with the ground soaked with blood till the sand was 
one red morass. 

Cecil held the Eagle still, and looked round on the few left 
to him. 

“ You are sons of the Old Guard; die like them.” 

They answered with a pealing cry, terrible as the cry of the 
lion in the hush of night, but a shout that had in it assent, 
triumph, fealty, victory, even as they obeyed him and drew up 
to die, while in their front was the young brow of Petit Picpon 
turned upward to the glare of the skies. 

There was nothing for them but to draw up thus, and await 
their butchery, defending the Eagle to the last; looking till 
the last toward that “woman’s face of their leader,” as they 
had often termed it, that was to them now as the face of Na- 
poleon was to the soldiers who loved him. 

There was a pause, brief as is the pause of the lungs to take 
a fuller breath. The Arabs honored these men, who alone and 
in the midst of the hostile force, held their ground and pre- 
pared thus to be slaughtered one by one, till of all the squadron 
that had ridden out in the darkness of the dawn there should 
be only a black, huddled, stiffened heap of dead men and of dead 
beasts. The chief who led them pressed them back, withholding 
them from the end that was so near to their hands when they 
should stretch that single ring of horsemen all lifeless in the 
dust. 

“You are great warriors,” he cried, in the Sabir tongue; 
“ surrender ; we will spare ! ” 

Cecil looked back once more on the fragment of his troop, 
and raised the Eagle higher aloft where the wings should 
glisten in the fuller day. Half naked, scorched, blinded; with 
an open gash in his shoulder where the lance had struck, and 
with his brow wet with the great dews of the noon-heat and 
the breathless toil; his eyes were clear as they flashed with the 
light of the sun in them ; his mouth smiled as he answered : 

“ Have we shown ourselves cowards, that you think we shall 
yield ? ” 

A hurrah of wild delight from the Chasseurs he led greeted 
and ratified the choice. “ On meurt — on ne se rend pas ! ” they 
shouted in the words which, even if they be but legendary, are 
too true to the spirit of the soldiers of France not to be as truth 


404 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


in their sight. Then, with their swords above their heads, they 
waited for the collision of the terrible attack which would fall 
on them upon every side, and strike all the sentient life out of 
them before the sun should be one point higher in the heavens. 
It came : with a yell as of wild beasts in their famine, the Arabs 
threw themselves forward, the chief himself singling out the 
“ fair Frank ” witi the violence of a lion flinging himself on a 
leopard. One instant longer, one flash of time, and the tribes 
pressing on them would have massacred them like cattle driven 
into the pens of slaughter. Ere it could be done, a voice like 
the ring of a silver trumpet echoed over the field: 

“ En avant ! En avant ! Tue, tue, tue ! ” 

Above the din, the shouts, the tumult, the echoing of the 
distant musketry, that silvery cadence rung; down into the 
midst, with the Tricolor waving above her head, the bridle of 
her fiery mare between her teeth, the raven of the dead Zouave 
flying above her head, and her pistol leveled in deadly aim, rode 
Cigarette. 

The lightning fire of the crossing swords played round her, 
the glitter of the lances dazzled her eyes, the reek of smoke 
and of carnage was round her; but she dashed down into the 
heart of the conflict as gayly as though she rode at a review — 
laughing, shouting, waving the torn colors that she grasped, 
with her curls blowing back in the breeze, and her bright young 
face set in the warrior’s lust. Behind her, by scarcely a length, 
galloped three squadrons of Chasseurs and Spahis; trampling 
headlong over the corpse-strewn field, and breaking through the 
masses of the Arabs as though they were seas of corn. 

She wheeled her mare round by Cecil’s side at the moment 
when, with six swift passes of his blade, he had warded off the 
Chief’s blows and sent his own sword down through the chest- 
bones of the Bedouin’s mighty form. 

“ Well struck! The day is turned! Charge!” 

She gave the order as though she were a Marshal of the Em- 
pire, the sun-blaze full on her where she sat on the rearing, 
fretting, half-bred gray, with the Tricolor folds above her head, 
and her teeth tight gripped on the chain-bridle, and her face 
all glowing and warm and full of the fierce fire of war — a little 
Amazon in scarlet and blue and gold; a young Jeanne d’Arc, 
with the crimson fez in lieu of the silvered casque, and the 
gay broideries of her fantastic dress instead of the breastplate 
of steel. And with the Flag of her idolatry, the Flag that was 


ZARAILA. 


405 


as her religion, floating back as she went, she spurred her mare 
straight against the Arabs, straight over the lifeless forms of 
the hundreds slain; and after her poured the fresh squadrons 
of cavalry, the ruby burnous of the Spahis streaming on the 
wind as their darling led them on to retrieve the day for France. 

Not a bullet struck, not a saber grazed her; but there, in the 
heat and the press of the worst of the slaughter. Cigarette 
rode hither and thither, to and fro, her voice ringing like a 
bird’s song over the field, in command, in applause, in encour- 
agement, in delight ; bearing her standard aloft and untouched ; 
dashing heedless through a storm of blows; cheering on her 
“ children ” to the charge again and again ; and all the while 
with the sunlight full on her radiant, spirited head, and with 
the grim, gray raven flying above her, shrieking shrilly its 
“ Tue, tue, tue! ” The Army believed with superstitious faith 
in the potent spell of that veteran bird, and the story ran that, 
whenever he flew above a combat, France was victor before the 
sun set. The echo of the raven’s cry, and the presence of the 
child who, they knew, would have a thousand musket-balls fired 
in her fair young breast rather than live to see them defeated, 
made the fresh squadrons sweep in like a whirlwind, bearing 
down all before them. 

Cigarette saved the day. 


/ 


CHAPTEK XXVII. 


THE LOYE OF THE AMAZON. 

Before the sun had declined from his zenith the French were 
masters of the field, and pursued the retreat of the Arabs 
till, for miles along the plain, the line of their flight was marked 
with horses that had dropped dead in the strain, and with the 
motionless forms of their desert-riders, their cold hands clinched 
in the loose, hot sands, and their stern faces turned upward to 
the cloudless scorch of their native skies, under whose freedom 
they would never again ride forth to the joyous clash of the 
cymbals and the fierce embrace of the death-grapple. 

When at length she returned, coming in with her ruthless 
Spahis, whose terrible passions she feared no more than Ver- 
gil’s Volscian huntress feared the beasts of the forest and plain, 
the raven still hovered above her exhausted mare, the torn flag 
was still in her left hand; and the bright laughter, the flash 
of ecstatic triumph, was still in her face as she sang the last 
lines of her own war-chant. The leopard nature was roused 
in her. She was a soldier; death had been about her from 
her birth; she neither feared to give nor to receive it; she was 
proud as ever was young Pompeius flushed with the glories 
of his first eastern conquests; she was happy as such elastic, 
sun-lit, dauntless youth as hers alone can be, returning in the 
reddening after-glow, at the head of her comrades, to the camp 
that she had saved. 

She could be cruel — women are, when roused, as many a 
revolution has shown ; she could be heroic — she would have died 
a hundred deaths for France; she was vain with a vivacious, 
childlike vanity; she was brave with a bravery beside which 
many a man’s high courage paled. Cruelty, heroism, vanity, 
and bravery were all on fire, and all fed to their uttermost, 
most eager, most ardent flame, now that she came back at the 
head of her Spahis ; while all who remained of the soldiers who, 
but for her, would have been massacred long ere then, without 
one spared among them, threw themselves forward, crowded 
round her, caressed, and laughed, and wept, and shouted with 


THE LOVE OF THE AMAZON. 


407 


all the changes of their intense mercurial temperaments; kissed 
her boots, her sash, her mare’s drooping neck, and, lifting her, 
with wild vivas that rent the sky, on to the shoulders of the 
two tallest men among them, bore her to the presence of the 
only officer of high rank who had survived the terrors of the 
day, a Chef de Bataillon of the Zouaves. 

And he, a grave and noble-looking veteran, uncovered his 
head and bowed before her as courtiers bow before their queens. 

“ Mademoiselle, you saved the honor of France. In the name 
of France, I thank you.” 

The tears rushed swift and hot into Cigarette’s bright eyes — 
tears of joy, tears of pride. She was but a child still in much, 
and she could be moved by the name of France as other children 
by the name of their mothers. 

“ Chut ! I did nothing,” she said rapidly. “ I only rode fast.” 

The frenzied hurrahs of the men who heard her drowned her 
words. They loved her for what she had done; they loved her 
better still because she set no count on it. 

“ The Empire will think otherwise,” said the Major of the 
Zouaves. “ Tell me, my Little One, how did you do this 
thing ? ” 

Cigarette, balancing herself with a foot on either shoulder 
of her supporters, gave the salute, and answered: 

“ Simply, mon Commandant — very simply. I was alone, rid- 
ing midway between you and the main army — three leagues, 
say, from each. I was all alone; only Vole-qui-veut flying with 
me for fun. I met a colon. I knew the man. For the matter 
of that, I did him once a service — saved his geese and his fowls 
from burning, one winter’s day, in their house, while he wrung 
his hands and looked on. Well, he was full of terror, and told 
me there was fighting yonder — here he meant — so I rode nearer 
to see. That was just upon sunrise. I dismounted, and ran 
up a palm there.” And Cigarette pointed to a far-off slope 
crowned with the remains of a once-mighty palm forest. “ I got 
up very high. I could see miles round. I saw how things were 
with you. For the moment I was coming straight to you. Then 
I thought I should do more service if I let the main army 
know, and brought you a re-enforcement. I rode fast. Dieu! 
I rode fast. My horse dropped under me twice; but I reached 
them at last, and I went at once to the General. He guessed at 
a glance how things were, and I told him to give me my Spahis 
and let me go. So he did. I got on a mare of his own staff, 


408 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


and away we came. Ma foi! it was a near thing. If we had 
been a minute later, it had been all up with you.” 

“ True, indeed,” muttered the Zouave in his beard. “ A 
superb action, my Little One. But did you meet no Arab 
scouts to stop you ? ” 

Cigarette laughed. 

“ Did I not? Met them by dozens. Some had a shot at me; 
some had a shot from me. One fellow nearly winged me" ; but I 
got through them all somehow. Sapristi! I galloped so fast 
I was very hard to hit flying. These things only require a 
little judgment; but some men, pardi ! always are creeping when 
they should fly, and always are scampering when they should 
saunter; and then they wonder when they make fiasco! 
Bah!” 

And Cigarette laughed again. Men were such bunglers — 
ouf ! 

“ Mademoiselle, if all soldiers were like you,” answered the 
Major of Zouaves curtly, “ to command a battalion would be 
paradise ! ” 

“ All soldiers would do anything I have done,” retorted Ciga- 
rette, who never took a compliment at the expense of her 
“ children.” “ They do not all get the opportunity, look you ; 
c’est tout! Opportunity is a little angel; some catch him as 
he goes, some let him pass by forever. You must be quick with 
him, for he is like an eel to wriggle away. If you want a good 
soldier, take that aristocrat of the Chasse-Marais — that beau 
Victor. Pouf! all his officers were down; and how splendidly 
he led the troop ! He was going to die with them rather than 
surrender. Napoleon” — and Cigarette uncovered her curly 
head reverentially as at the name of a deity — “ Napoleon would 
have given him his brigade ere this. If you had seen him kill 
the chief!” 

“ He will have justice done him, never fear. And for you 
— the Cross shall be on your breast, Cigarette, if I live over 
to-night to write my dispatches.” 

And the Chef de Bataillon saluted her once more, and turned 
away to view the carnage-strewn plain, and number the few 
who remained out of those who had been wakened by the clash 
of the Arab arms in the gray of the earliest dawn. 

Cigarette’s eyes flashed like sun playing on water, and her 
flushed cheeks grew scarlet. Since her infancy it had been her 
dream to have the Cross, to have the Grande Croix to lie above 


T. E LOVE OF THE AMAZON. 


409 


her little lion’s heart; it had been the one longing, the one am- 
bition, the only undying desire of her soul ; and lo ! she touched 
its realization! 

The wild, frantic, tumultuous cheers and caresses of her 
soldiery, who could not triumph in her and triumph with her 
enough to satiate them, recalled her to the actual moment. She 
sprang down from her elevation, and turned on them with a 
rebuke. “ Ah ! you are making this fuss about me while hun- 
dreds of better soldiers than I lie yonder. Let us look to them 
first; we will play the fool afterward.” 

And, though she had ridden fifty miles that day, if she had 
ridden one — though she had eaten nothing since sunrise, and 
had only had one draught of bad water — though she was tired, 
and stiff, and bruised, and parched with thirst, Cigarette dashed 
off as lightly as a young goat to look for the wounded and the 
dying men who strewed the plain far and near. 

She remembered one whom she had not seen after that first 
moment in which she had given the word to the squadrons to 
charge. 

It was a terrible sight — the arid plain, lying in the scarlet 
glow of sunset, covered with dead bodies, with mutilated limbs, 
with horses gasping and writhing, with men raving like mad 
creatures in the torture of their wounds. It was a sight which 
always went to her heart. She was a true soldier, and, though 
she could deal death pitilessly, could, when the delirium of 
war was over, tend and yield infinite compassion to those who 
were in suffering. But such scenes had been familiar to her 
from the earliest years when, on an infant’s limbs, she had 
toddled over such battlefields, and wound tiny hands in the hair 
of. some dead trooper who had given her sweetmeats the hour 
before, vainly trying to awaken him. And she went through 
all the intense misery and desolation of the scene now without 
shrinking, and with that fearless, tender devotion to the 
wounded which Cigarette showed in common with other soldiers 
of her nation ; being, like them, a young lion in the combat, but 
a creature unspeakably gentle and full of sympathy when the 
fury of the fight was over. 

She had seen great slaughter often enough, but even she had 
not seen any struggle more close, more murderous, than this 
had been. The dead lay by hundreds; French and Arab locked 
in one another’s limbs as they had fallen when the ordinary 
mode of warfare had failed to satiate their violence, and they 


410 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


had wrestled together like wolves fighting and rending each 
other over a disputed carcass. The bitterness and the hatred 
of the contest were shown in the fact that there were very few 
merely wounded or disabled; almost all the numbers that 
strewed the plain were dead. It had been a battle-royal, and, 
but for her arrival with the fresh squadrons, not one among her 
countrymen would have lived to tell the story of this terrible 
duello which had been as magnificent in heroism a*s any Auster- 
litz or Gemappes, but which would pass unhonored, almost un- 
named, among the futile, fruitless heroisms of Algerian war- 
fare. 

“ Is he killed ? Is he killed ? ” she thought, as she bent over 
each knot of motionless bodies, where, here and there, some 
faint, stifled breath, or some moan of agony, told that life still 
lingered beneath the huddled, stiffening heap. And a tightness 
came at her heart, an aching fear made her shrink, as she raised 
each hidden face, that she had never known before. “ What if 
he be ? ” she said fiercely to herself. “ It is nothing to me. I 
hate him, the cold aristocrat ! I ought to be glad if I see him lie 
here.” 

But, despite her hatred for him, she could not banish that 
hot, feverish hope, that cold, suffocating fear, which, turn by 
turn, quickened and slackened the bright flow of her warm, 
young blood as she searched among the slain. 

“ Ah ! le pauvre Picpon ! ” she said softly, as she reached at 
last the place where the young Chasseur lay, and lifted the 
black curls off his forehead. The hoofs of the charging cavalry 
had cruelly struck and trampled his frame; the back had been 
broken, and the body had been mashed as in a mortar under 
the thundering gallop of the Horse ; but the face was still unin- 
jured, and had a strange, pathetic beauty, a calm and smiling 
courage on it. It was ashen pale ; but the great black eyes that 
had glistened in such malicious mirth, and sparkled in such 
malignant mischief during life, were open, and had a mournful, 
pitiful serenity in their look as if from their depths the soul 
still gazed — that soul which had been neglected and cursed, and 
left to wander among evil ways, yet which, through all its dark- 
ness, all its ignorance, had reached, unguided, to love and to 
nobility. 

Cigarette closed their long, black lashes down on the white 
cheeks with soft and reverent touch; she had seen that look 
ere now on the upturned faces of the dead who had strewn the 


THE LOVE OF THE AMAZON. 411 

barricades of Paris, with the words of the Marseillaise the last 
upon their lips. 

To her there could be no fate fairer, no glory more glorious, 
than this of his — to die for France. And she laid him gently 
down, and left him, and went on with her quest. 

It was here that she had lost sight of Cecil as they had 
charged together, and her mare, enraged and intoxicated with 
noise and terror, had torn away at a full speed that had out- 
stripped even the swiftest of her Spahis. A little farther on 
a dog’s moan caught her ear; she turned and looked across. 
Upright, among a ghastly pile of men and chargers, sat the 
small, snowy poodle of the Chasseurs, beating the air with its 
little paws, as it had been taught to do when it needed anything, 
and howling piteously as it begged. 

“ Flick-Flack ? What is it, Flick-Flack ? ” she cried to him, 
while, with a bound, she reached the spot. The dog leaped on 
her, rejoicing. The dead were thick there — ten or twelve deep — 
French trooper and Bedouin rider flung across each other, hor- 
ribly entangled with the limbs, the manes, the shattered bodies 
of their own horses. Among them she saw the face she sought, 
as the dog eagerly ran back, caressing the hair of a soldier who 
lay underneath the weight of his gray charger, that had been 
killed by a musket-ball. 

Cigarette grew very pale, as she had never grown when the 
hailstorm of shots had been pouring on her in the midst of a 
battle; but, with the rapid skill and strength she had acquired 
long before, she reached the place, lifted aside first one, then 
another of the lifeless Arabs that had fallen above him, and 
drew out from beneath the suffocating pressure of his horse’s 
weight the head and the frame of the Chasseur whom Flick- 
Flack had sought out and guarded. 

For a moment she thought him dead; then, as she drew him 
out where the cooled breeze of the declining day could reach 
him, a slow breath, painfully drawn, moved his chest; she saw 
that he was unconscious from the stifling oppression under 
which he had been buried since the noon; an hour more witL- 
out the touch of fresher air, and life would have been extinct. 

Cigarette had with her the flask of brandy that she always 
brought on such errands as these; she forced the end between 
his lips, and poured some down his throat; her hand shook 
slightly as she did so, a weakness the gallant little campaigner 
never before then had known. 


412 


UKDER TWO FLAGS. 


It revived him in a degree; he breathed more freely, though 
heavily, and with difficulty still; but gradually the deadly, 
leaden color of his face was replaced by the hue of life, and his 
heart began to beat more loudly. Consciousness did not return 
to him; he lay motionless and senseless, with his head resting 
on her lap, and with Flick-Flack, in eager affection, licking 
his hands and his hair. 

“ He was as good as dead, Flick-Flack, if it had not been 
for you and me,” said Cigarette, while she wetted his lips with 
more brandy. “ Ah, bah ! and he would be more grateful, Flick- 
Flack, for a scornful scoff from Miladi ! ” 

Still, though she thought this, she let his head lie on her 
lap, and, as she looked down on him, there was the glisten as 
of tears in the brave, sunny eyes of the little Friend of the 
Flag. 

“ II est si beau, si beau, si beau ! ” she muttered in her teeth, 
drawing the silk-like locks of his hair through her hands, and 
looking at the stricken strength, the powerless limbs, the bare 
chest, cut and bruised, and heaved painfully by each uneasy 
breath. She was of a vivid, voluptuous, artistic nature; she 
was thoroughly woman-like in her passions and her instincts, 
though she so fiercely contemned womanhood. If he had not 
been beautiful she would never have looked twice at him, never 
once have pitied his fate. 

And he was beautiful still, though his hair was heavy with 
dew and dust; though his face was scorched with powder; 
though his eyes were closed as with the leaden weight of death, 
and his beard was covered with the red stain of blood that had 
flowed from the lance-wound on his shoulder. 

He was not dead; he was not even in peril of death. She 
knew enough of medical lore to know that it was but the in- 
sensibility of exhaustion and suffocation; and she did not care 
that he should waken. She drooped her head over him, moving 
her hand softly among the masses of his curls, and watching 
the quickening beatings of his heart under the bare, strong 
nerves. Her face grew tender, and warm, and eager, and melt- 
ing with a marvelous change of passionate hues. She had all 
the ardor of southern blood; without a wish he had wakened in 
her a love that grew daily and hourly, though she would not 
acknowledge it. She loved to. see him lie there as though he 
were asleep, to cheat herself into the fancy that she watched his 
rest to wake it with a kiss on his lips. In that unconsciousness, 


THE LOYE OF THE AMAZON. 


413 


in that abandonment, he seemed wholly her own ; passion which 
she could not have analyzed made her bend above him with a 
half -fierce, half-dreamy delight in that solitary possession of 
his beauty, of his life. 

The restless movements of little Flick-Flack detached a piece 
of twine passed round his favorite’s throat; the glitter of gold 
arrested Cigarette’s eyes. She caught what the poodle’s im- 
patient caress had broken from the string. It was a small, blue- 
enamel medallion bonbon-box, with a hole through it by which 
it had been slung — a tiny toy once costly, now tarnished, for 
it had been carried through many rough scenes and many years 
of hardship ; had been bent by blows struck at the breast against 
which it rested, and was clotted now with blood. Inside it was 
a woman’s ring, of sapphires and opals. 

She looked at both close, in the glow of the setting sun; 
then passed the string through and fastened the box afresh. It 
was a mere trifle, but it sufficed to banish her dream ; to arouse 
her to contemptuous, impatient bitterness with that new weak- 
ness that had for the hour broken her down to the level of this 
feverish folly. He was beautiful — yes! She could not bring 
herself to hate him; she could not help the brimming tears 
blinding her eyes when she looked at him, stretched senseless 
thus. But he was wedded to his past; that toy in his breast, 
whatever it might be, whatever tale might cling to it, was 
sweeter to him than her lips would ever be. Bah! there were 
better men than he; why had she not let him lie and die as he 
might, under the pile of dead? 

Bah! she could have killed herself for her folly! She, who 
had scores of lovers, from princes to piou-pious, and never had 
a heartache for one of them, to go and care for a silent “ci- 
devant,” who had never even noticed that her eyes had any 
brightness or her face had any charm! 

“ You deserve to be shot — you! ” said Cigarette, fiercely abus- 
ing herself as she put his head off her lap, and rose abruptly 
and shouted to a Tringlo, who was at some distance searching 
for the wounded. “ Here is a Chasse-Marais with some breath 
in him,” she said curtly, as the man with his mule-cart and 
its sad burden of half-dead, moaning, writhing frames drew 
near to her summons. “Put him in. Soldiers cost too much 
training to waste them on jackals and kites, if one can help it. 
Xift him up — quick ! ” 

“He is badly hurt?” said the Tringlo. 


414 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


She shrugged her shoulders. 

“ Oh, no ! I have had worse scratches myself. The horse 
fell on him, that was the mischief. Most of them here have 
swallowed the ‘ petite pilule d’oubli ’ once and for all. I never 
saw a prettier thing — every Lascar has killed his own little knot 
of Arbicos. Look how nice and neat they lie.” 

Cigarette glanced over the field, with the satisfied apprecia- 
tion of a dilletante glancing over a Soltikoff or Blacas collec- 
tion unimpeachable for accuracy and arrangement; and drank 
a toss of her brandy, and lighted her little amber pipe, and 
sang loudly, as she did so, the gayest ballad of the Langue 
Verte. 

* She was not going to have him imagine she cared for that. 
Chasseur whom he lifted up on his little wagon with so kindly 
a care — not she! Cigarette was as proud in her way as was. 
ever the Princess Venetia Corona. 

Nevertheless, she kept pace with the mules, carrying little 
Plick-Flack, and never paused on her way, though she passed 
scores of dead Arabs, whose silver ornaments and silk em- 
broideries, commonly after such a fantasia, replenished the 
knapsack and adorned in profusion the uniform of the young: 
fiilibuster; being gleaned by her, right and left, as her lawful 
harvest after the fray. 

“ Leave him there. I will have a look at him,” she said, at. 
the first empty tent they reached. The camp had been the 
6cene of as fierce a struggle as the part of the plain which the 
cavalry had held, and it was strewn with the slaughter of 
Zouaves and Tirailleurs. The Tringlo obeyed her, and went 
about his errand of mercy. Cigarette, left alone with the 
wounded man, lying insensible still on a heap of forage, ceased: 
her song and grew very quiet. She had a certain surgical skill, 
learned as her untutored genius learned most things, with mar- 
velous rapidity, by observation and intuition; and she had 
saved many a life by her knowledge and her patient attendance- 
on the sufferers — patience that she had been famed for when 
she had been only six years old, and a surgeon of the Algerian 
regiments had affirmed that he could trust her to be as wake- 
ful, as watchful, and as sure to obey his directions as though 
she were a Sceur de Charite. Now “the little fagot of oppo- 
sites,” as Cecil had called her, put this skill into active use. 

The tent had been a scullion’s tent; the poor marmiton had 
been killed, and lay outside, with his head clean severed by an 


THE LOVE OF THE AMAZON. 


415 


Arab flissa; his fire had gone out, but his brass pots and pans, 
his jar of fresh water, and his various preparations for the 
General’s dinner were still there. The General was dead also; 
far yonder, where he had fallen in the van of his Zouaves, ex- 
posing himself with all the splendid, reckless gallantry of 
France; and the soup stood unserved; the wild plovers were 
taken by Flick-Flack; the empty dishes waited for the viands 
which there were no hands to prepare and no mouths to eat. 
Cigarette glanced round, and saw all with one flash of her eyes ; 
then she knelt down beside the heap of forage, and, for the 
first thing, dressed his wounds with the cold, clear water, and 
washed away the dust and the blood that covered his breast. 

“ He is too good a soldier to die ; one must do it for F ranee,” 
she said to herself, in a kind of self-apology. And as she did 
it, and bound the lance-gash close, and bathed his breast, his 
forehead, his hair, his beard, free from the sand and the powder 
and the gore, a thousand changes swept over her mobile face. 
It was one moment soft, and flushed, and tender as passion; it 
was the next jealous, fiery, scornful, pale, and full of impa- 
tient self-disdain. 

He was nothing to her — morbleu ! He was an aristocrat, and 
she was a child of the people. She had been besieged by dukes 
and had flouted princes; she had borne herself in such gay lib- 
erty, such vivacious freedom, such proud and careless sover- 
eignty — bah! what was it to her whether this man lived or 
died? If she saved him, he would give her a low bow as he 
thanked her ; thinking all the while of Miladi ! 

And yet she went on with her work. 

Cecil had been stunned by a stroke from his horse’s hoof 
as the poor beast fell beneath and rolled over him. His wounds 
were slight — marvelously so, for the thousand strokes that had 
been aimed at him; but it was difficult to arouse him from 
unconsciousness, and his face was white as death where he lay 
on the heap of dry reeds and grasses. She began to feel fear 
of that lengthened syncope; a chill, tight, despairing fear that 
she had never known in her life before. She knelt silent a mo- 
ment, drawing through her hand the wet locks of his hair with 
the bright threads of gold gleaming in it. 

Then she started up, and, leaving him, found a match, and 
lighted the died-out wood afresh; the fire soon blazed up, and 
she warmed above it the soup that had grown cold, poured into 
it some red wine that was near, and forced some, little by little, 


416 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


down his throat. It was with difficulty at first that she 30 uld 
pass any through his tightly locked teeth; but by degrees she 
succeeded, and, only half-conscious still, he drank it faster; the 
heat and the strength reviving him as its stimulant warmed his 
veins. His eyes did not unclose, but he stirred, moved his 
limbs, and, with some muttered words she could not hear, drew 
a deeper breath and turned. 

“ He will sleep now — he is safe,” she thought to herself, while 
she stood watching him with a curious conflict of pity, impa- 
tience, anger, and relief at war within her. 

Bah! Why was she always doing good services to this man, 
who only cared for the blue, serene eyes of a woman who would 
never give him aught except pain? Why should she take such 
care to keep the fire of vitality alight in him, when it had been 
crushed out in thousands as good as he, who would have no 
notice save a hasty thrust into the earth; no funeral chant ex- 
cept the screech of the carrion-birds? 

Cigarette had been too successful in her rebellion against all 
weakness, and was far too. fiery a young warrior to find refuge 
or consolation in the poet’s plea, 

‘ ‘ How is it under our control to love or not to love ? ” 

To allow anything to gain ascendency over her that she resisted, 
to succumb to any conqueror that was unbidden and unwelcome, 
was a submission beyond words degrading to the fearless 
soldier-code of the Friend of the Flag. And yet — there she 
stayed and watched him. She took some food, for she had been 
fasting all day; then she dropped down before the fire she had 
lighted, and, in one of those soft, curled, kitten-like attitudes 
that were characteristic of her, kept her vigil over him. 

She was bruised, stiff, tired, longing like a tired child to fall 
asleep; her eyes felt hot as flame; her rounded, supple limbs 
were aching, her throat was sore with long thirst and the sand 
that she seemed to have swallowed till no draught of water or 
wine would take the scorched, dry pain out of it. But, as she 
had given up her fete-day in the hospital, so she sat now — 
as patient in the self-sacrifice as she was impatient when the 
vivacious agility of her young frame was longing for the fren- 
zied delights of the dance or the battle. 

Yonder she knew, where her Spahis bivouacked on the hard- 
won field, there were riotous homage, wild applause, intoxi- 
cating triumph waiting for the Little One who had saved the 


THE LOVE OF THE AMAZON. 417 

day, if she chose to go out for it ; and she loved to be the center 
of such adoration and rejoicing, with all the exultant vanity of 
a child and a hero in one. Here there were warmth of flames, 
quietness of rest, long hours for slumber; all that her burn- 
ing eyes and throbbing nerves were longing for, as the sleep 
she would not yield to stole on her, and the racking pain of 
fatigue cramped her bones. But she would not go to the pleas- 
ure without, and she would not give way to the weariness that 
tortured her. 

Cigarette could crucify self with a generous courage, all the 
purer because it never occurred to her that there was anything 
of virtue or of sacrifice in it. She was acting en bon soldat — 
that was all. Pouf ! that wanted no thanks. 

. Silence settled over the camp; half the slain could not be 
buried, and the clear, luminous stars rose on the ghastly plateau. 
All that were heard were the challenge of sentinels, the tramp 
of patrols. The guard visited her once. “ C’est Cigarette,” she 
said briefly, and she was left undisturbed. 

She kept herself awake in the little dark tent, only lit by 
the glow of the fire. Dead men were just without, and in the 
moonlight without, as the night came on, she could see the 
severed throat of the scullion, and the head farther off, like 
a round, gray stone. But that was nothing to Cigarette; dead 
men were no more to her than dead trees are to others. 

Every now and then, four or five times in an hour, she gave 
him whom she tended the soup or the wine that she kept warmed 
for him over the embers. He took it without knowledge, sunk 
half in lethargy, half in sleep; but it kept the life glowing in 
him which, without it, might have perished of cold and ex- 
haustion as the chills and northerly wind of the evening suc- 
ceeded to the heat of the day, and pierced through the canvas 
walls of the tent. It was very bitter; more keenly felt because 
of the previous burning of the sun. There was no cloak or 
covering to fling over him; she took off her blue cloth tunic 
and threw it across his chest, and, shivering despite herself, 
curled closer to the little fire. 

She did not know why she did it — he was nothing to her — 
and yet she kept herself wide awake through the dark autumn 
night, lest he should sigh or stir and she not hear him. 

“ I have saved his life twice,” she thought, looking at him; 
“ beware of the third time, they say ! ” 

He moved restlessly, and she went to him. His face was 


418 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


flushed now; his breath came rapidly and shortly; there was 
some fever on him. The linen was displaced from his wounds; 
she dipped it again in water, and laid the cooled bands on them. 

“ Ah, bah ! If I were not unsexed enough for this, how would 
it be with you now ? ” she said in her teeth. He tossed wearily 
to and fro ; detached words caught her ear as he muttered them. 

“ Let it be, let it be — he is welcome ! How could I prove it 
at his cost ? I saved him — I could do that. It was not 
much ” 

She listened with intent anxiety to hear the other whispers 
ending the sentence, but they were stifled and broken. 

“ Tiens! ” she murmured below her breath. “It is for some 
other he has ruined himself.” 

She could not catch the words that followed. They were in 
an unknown language to her, for she knew nothing of English, 
and they poured fast and obscure from his lips as he moved in 
feverish unrest; the wine that had saved him from exhaustion 
inflaming his brain in his sleep. How and then French phrases 
crossed the English ones; she leaned down to seize their mean- 
ing till her cheek was against his forehead, till her lips touched 
his hair ; and at that half caress her heart beat, her face flushed, 
her mouth trembled with a too vivid joy, with an impulse, half 
fear and half longing, that had never so moved her before. 

“ If I had my birthright,” he muttered in her own tongue. 

“ If I had it — would she look so cold then ? She might love 
me — women used once. O God! if she had not looked on me, 
I had never known all I had lost ! ” 

Cigarette started as if a knife had stabbed her, and sprang 
up from her rest beside him. 

“ She — she — always she ! ” she muttered fiercely, while her . 
face grew duskily scarlet in the fire-glow of the tent; and she 
went slowly away, back to the low wood fire. 

This was to be ever her reward ! 

Her eyes glistened and flashed with the fiery, vengeful pas- 
sions of her hot and jealous instincts. Cigarette had in her 
the violence, as she had the nobility, of a grand nature that 
has gone wholly untutored and uuguided ; and she had the power 
of southern vengeance in her, though she had also the swift 
and rapid impulse to forgiveness of a generous and sunlit 
temper. It was bitter, beyond any other bitterness that could 
have wounded her, for the spoilt, victorious, imperious, little 
empress of the Army of Algeria to feel that, though she had 


THE LOVE OF THE AMAZON. 


419 


given his life twice back to this man, she was less to him than 
the tiny white dog that nestled in his breast; that she, who 
never before had endured a slight, or known what neglect could 
mean, gave care, and pity, and aid, and even tenderness, to one 
whose only thought was for a woman who had accorded him 
nothing but a few chill syllables of haughty condescension! 

He lay there unconscious of her presence, tossing wearily to 
and fro in fevered, unrefreshing sleep, murmuring incoherent 
words of French and English strangely mingled; and Cigarette 
crouched on tfye ground, with the firelight playing all over her 
picturesque, childlike beauty, and her large eyes strained and 
savage, yet with a strange, wistful pain in them; looking out 
at the moonlight where the headless body lay in a cold, gray 
sea of shadow. 

Yet she did not leave him. 

She was too generous for that. “ What is right is right. He 
is a soldier of France,” she muttered, while she kept her vigil. 
She felt no want of sleep; a hard, hateful wakefulness seemed 
to have banished all rest from her ; she stayed there all the night 
through. Whenever she could ease or aid him she rose and did 
so, with the touch of water on his forehead, or of cooled wine 
to his lips, by the alteration of the linen on his wounds, or 
the shifting of the rough forage that made his bed. But she 
did it without anything, of that loving, lingering attendance 
she had given before; she never once drew out the task longer 
than it needed, or let her hands wander among his hair, or over 
his lips, as she had done before. 

And he never once was conscious of it; he never once knew 
that she was near. He did not waken from the painful, deliri- 
ous, stupefied slumber that had fallen on him; he only vaguely 
felt that he was suffering pain; he only vaguely dreamed of 
what he murmured of — his past, and the beauty of the woman 
who had brought all the memories of that past back on him. 

And this was Cigarette’s reward — to hear him mutter wearily 
of the proud eyes and of the lost smile of another ! 

The dawn came at last; her constant care and the skill with 
which she had cooled and dressed his wounds had done him 
infinite service ; the fever had subsided, and toward morning his 
incoherent words ceased, his breathing grew calmer and more 
tranquil; he fell asleep — sleep that was profound, dreamless, 
and refreshing. 

She looked at him with a tempestuous shadow darkening hqr 


420 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


face, that was soft with a tenderness that she could not banish. 
She hated him; she ought to have stabbed or shot him rather 
than have tended him thus; he neglected her, and only thought 
of that woman of his old Order. As a daughter of the People, 
as a child of the Army, as a soldier of France, she ought to 
have killed him rather than have caressed his hair and soothed 
his pain! Pshaw! She ground one in another her tiny white 
teeth, that were like a spaniel’s. 

Then gently, very gently, lest she should waken him, she 
took her tunic skirt with which she had covered him from the 
chills of the night, put more broken wood on the fading fire, and 
with a last, lingering look at him where he slept, passed out 
from the tent as the sun rose in a flushed and beautiful dawn. 
He would never know that she had saved him thus: he never 
should know it, she vowed in her heart. 

Cigarette was very haughty in her own wayward, careless 
fashion. At a word of love from him, at a kiss from his lips, 
at a prayer from his voice, she would have given herself to 
him in all the abandonment of a first passion, and have gloried 
in being known as his mistress. But she would have perished 
by a thousand deaths rather than have sought him through his 
pity or through his gratitude; rather than have accepted the 
compassion of a heart that gave its warmth to another; rather 
than have ever let him learn that he was any more to her than 
all their other countless comrades who filled up the hosts of 
Africa. 

“ He will never know,” she said to herself, as she passed 
through the disordered camp, and in a distant quarter coiled 
herself among the hay of a forage-wagon, and covered up in 
dry grass, like a bird in a nest, let her tired limbs lie and 
her aching eyes close in repose. She was very tired; and every 
now and then, as she slept, a quick, sobbing breath shook her 
as she slumbered, like a worn-out fawn who has been wounded 
while it played. 




CHAPTER XXVIII. 


THE LEATHERN ZACKRIST. 

With the reveille and the break of morning Cigarette woke, 
herself again ; she gave a little petulant shake to her fairy form 
when she thought of what folly she had been guilty. “ Ah, bah ! 
you deserve to be shot,” she said to herself afresh. “ One would 
think you were a Silver Pheasant — you grow such a little fool ! ” 

Love was all very well, so Cigarette’s philosophy had always 
reckoned ; a chocolate bonbon, a firework, a bagatelle, a draught 
of champagne, to flavor an idle moment. “ Vin et Venus ” she 
had always been accustomed to see worshiped together, as be- 
came their alliterative; it was a bit of fun — that was all. A 
passion that had pain in it had never touched the Little One; 
she had disdained it with lightest, airiest contumely. “ If your 
sweetmeat has a bitter almond in it, eat the sugar and throw 
the almond away, you goose! That is simple enough, isn’t it? 
Bah! I don’t pity the people who eat the bitter almond;* not 
I — ce sont bien betes, ces gens ! ” she had said once, when argu- 
ing with an officer on the absurdity of a melancholy love that 
possessed him, and whose sadness she rallied most unmercifully. 
Now, for once in her young life, the Child of France found 
that it was remotely possible to meet with almonds so bitter 
that the taste will remain and taint all things, do what philoso- 
phy may to throw its acridity aside. 

With the reveille she awoke, herself again, though she had 
not had more than an hour’s slumber — awoke, it is true, with 
a dull ache at her heart that was very new and bitterly unwel- 
come to her, but with the buoyant vivacity and the proud care- 
lessness of her nature in arms against it, and with that gayety 
of childhood inherent to her repelling, and very nearly success- 
fully, the foreign depression that weighed on it. 

Her first thought was to take care that he should never learn 
what she had done for him. The Princess Corona would not 
have more utterly disdained to solicit regard through making 
a claim upon gratitude than the fiery little warrior of France 
would have done. She went straight to the Tringlo who had 
known her at her mission of mercy. 


421 


422 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ Georges, mon brave,” said the Little One, with that accent 
of authority which was as haughty as any General’s, “ do you 
know how that Chasseur is that we brought in last night ? ” 

“ Not heard, ma belle,” said the cheery little Tringlo, who 
was hard pressed; for there was much to be done, and he was 
very busy. 

“ What is to be done with the wounded ? ” 

Georges lifted his eyebrows. 

“ Ma belle ! there are very few. There are hundreds of dead. 
It was a duel a outrance yesterday. The few there are we shall 
take with an escort of Spahis to headquarters.” 

“ Good. I will go with you. Have a heed, Georges, never 
to whisper that I had anything to do with saving that man I 
called to you about.” 

“ And why, my Little One.” 

“ Because I desire you ! ” said Cigarette, with her most im- 
perious emphasis. “ They say he is English, and a ruined 
Milord, pardieu! Now, I would not have an Englishman think 
I thought his six feet of carcass worth saving, for a ransom.” 

The Tringlo chuckled; he was an Anglophobist. In the 
Chinese expedition his share of “loot” had been robbed from 
him by a trick of which two English soldiers had been the con- 
cocters, and a vehement animosity against the whole British 
race had been the fruit of it in him. 

“ Non, non, non ! ” he answered her heartily. “ I understand. 
Thou art very right, Cigarette. If we have ever obliged an 
Englishman, he thinks his obligation to us opens him a neat 
little door through which to cheat us. It is very dangerous 
to oblige the English; they always hate you for it. That is 
their way. They may have virtues ; they may,” he added dubi- 
ously, but with an impressive air of strictest impartiality, “ but 
among them is not written gratitude. Ask that man, Rac, how 
they treat their soldiers ! ” and M. Georges hurried away to his 
mules and his duties; thinking with loving regret of the de- 
licious Chinese plunder of which the dogs of Albion had de- 
prived him. 

“ He is safe ! ” thought Cigarette ; of the patrol who had seen 
her she was not afraid — he had never noticed with whom she 
was when he had put his head into the scullion’s tent; and 
she made her way toward the place where she had left him, to 
see how it went with this man who she was so careful should 
never know that which he had owed to her. 


THE LEATHERN ZACKRlST. 


423 


It went well with him, thanks to her ; care, and strengthening 
nourishment, and the skill of her tendance had warded off all 
danger from his wound. The bruise and pressure from the 
weight of the horse had been more ominous, and he could not 
raise himself or even breathe without severe pain ; but his fever 
had left him, and he had just been lifted into a mule-drawn 
ambulance-wagon as Cigarette reached the spot. 

“How goes the day, M. Victor? So you got sharp scratches, 
I hear? Ah! that was a splendid thing we had yesterday! 
When did you go down? We charged together!” she cried 
gayly to him; then her voice dropped suddenly, with an in- 
describable sweetness and change of tone. “ So ! — you suffer 
still ? ” she asked softly. 

Coming close up to where he lay on the straw, she saw the 
exhausted languor of his regard, the heavy darkness under his 
eyelids, the effort with which his lips moved as the faint words 
came broken through them. 

“ Hot very much, ma belle, I thank you. I shall be fit for 
harness in a day or two. Do not let them send me into hospital. 
I shall be perfectly — well — soon.” 

Cigarette swayed herself upon the wheel and leaned toward 
him, touching and changing his bandages with clever hands. 

“ They have dressed your wound ill ; whose doing is that ? ” 

“ It is nothing. I have been half cut to pieces before now ; 

this is a mere bagatelle. It is only ” 

“ That it hurts you to breathe ? I know ! Have they given 
you anything to eat this morning ? ” 

“ Ho. Everything is in confusion. We ” 

She did not stay for the conclusion of his sentence; she had 
darted off, quick as a swallow. She knew what she had left in 
her dead scullion’s tent. Everything was in confusion, as he 
had said. Of the few hundreds that had been left after the 
terrific onslaught of the past day, some were employed far out, 
thrusting their own dead into the soil; others were removing 
the tents and all the equipage of the camp; others were busied 
with the wounded, of whom the greatest sufferers were to be 
borne to the nearest hospital (that nearest many leagues away 
over the wild and barren country) ; while those who were likely 
to be again soon ready for service were to be escorted to the 
headquarters of the main army. Among the latter Cecil had 
passionately entreated to be numbered ; his prayer was granted 
to the man who had kept at the head of his Chasseurs and borne 


424 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


aloft the Tricolor through the whole of the war-tempest on 
which the dawn had risen, and which had barely lulled and sunk 
by the setting of the sun. Chateauroy was away with the other 
live of his squadrons ; and the Zouave chef-de-bataillon, the only 
officer of any rank who had come alive through the conflict, had 
himself visited Bertie, and given him warm words of eulogy, 
and even of gratitude, that had soldierly sincerity and cor- 
diality in them. 

“ Your conduct was magnificent,” he had said, as he had 
turned away. “ It shall be my care that it is duly reported and 
rewarded.” 

Cigarette was but a few seconds absent; she soon bounded 
back like the swift little chamois she was, bringing with her 
a huge bowlful of red wine with bread broken in it. 

“ This is the best I could get,” she said ; “ it is better than 
nothing. It will strengthen you.” 

“ What have you had yourself, petite ? ” 

“ Ah, bah ! Leave off thinking for others ; I have breakfasted 
long ago,” she answered him. (She had only eaten a biscuit 
well-nigh as hard as a flint.) “ Take it — here, I will hold it 
for you.” 

She perched herself on the wheel like a bird on a twig; she 
had a bird’s power of alighting and sustaining herself on the 
most difficult and most airy elevation; but Cecil turned his 
eyes on the only soldier in the cart beside himself, one of the 
worst men in his regiment — a murderous, sullen, black-browed, 
evil wretch, fitter for the bench of the convict-galley than for 
the ranks of the cavalry. 

“Give half to Zackrist,” he said. “I know no hunger; and 
he has more need of it.” 

“ Zackrist ! that is the man who stole your lance and ac- 
couterments, and got you into trouble by taking them to pawn 
in your name, a year or more ago.” 

“Well, what of that? He is not the less hungry.” 

“ What of that ? Why, you were going to be turned into the 
First Battalion* disgraced for the affair, because you would 
not tell of him; if Vireflau had not found out the right of the 
matter in time ! ” 

“ What has that to do with it ? ” 

“ This, M. Victor, that you are a fool.” 

* The battalion of the criminal outcasts of all corps, whether horse or foot ; 
answering to the Straf bataillons of the Austrian service. 


THE LEATHERN ZACKRIST. 425 

“ I dare say I am. But that does not make Zackrist less 
hungry.” 

He took the bowl from her hands and, emptying a little of 
it into the wooden bidon that hung to her belt, kept that for 
himself and, stretching his arm across the straw, gave the bowl 
to Zackrist, who had watched it with the longing, ravenous 
eyes of a starving wolf, and seized it with rabid avidity. 

A smile passed over Cecil’s face, amused despite the pain 
he suffered. 

“ That is one of my ‘ sensational tricks,’ as M. de Chateauroy 
calls them. Poor Zackrist! did you see his eyes?” 

“ A jackal’s eyes, yes ! ” said Cigarette, who, between her 
admiration for the action and her impatience at the waste of 
her good bread and wine, hardly knew whether to applaud or to 
deride him. “ What recompense do you think you will get ? 
He will steal your things again, first chance.” 

“ May be. I don’t think he will. But he is very hungry, all 
the same; that is about the only question just now,” he an- 
swered her as he drank and ate his portion, with a need of it 
that could willingly have made him take thrice as much, though, 
for the sake of Zackrist, he had denied his want of it. 

Zackrist himself, who could hear perfectly what was said, 
uttered no word; but when he had finished the contents of 
the bowl, lay looking at his corporal with an odd gleam in the 
dark, sullen, savage depths of his hollow eyes. He was not go- 
ing to say a word of thanks ; no ! none had ever heard a grate- 
ful or a decent word from him in his life; he was proud of 
that. He was the most foul-mouthed brute in the army, and, 
like Snake in the School for Scandal, thought a good action 
would have ruined his character forever. Nevertheless, there 
came into his cunning and ferocious eyes a glisten of the same 
light which had been in the little gamin’s when, first by the 
bivouac fire, he had murmured, “ Picpon s’en souviendra.” 

“ When anybody stole from me,” muttered Cigarette, “ I shot 
him.” 

“You would have fed him, had he been starving. Do not 
belie yourself, Cigarette; you are too generous ever to be vin- 
dictive.” 

“ Pooh ! Revenge is one’s right.” 

“ I doubt that. We are none of us good enough to claim it, 
at any rate.” 

Cigarette shrugged her shoulders in silence; then, poising 


426 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


herself on the wheel, she sprang from thence on to the back of 
her little mare, which she had brought up; having the reins in 
one of her hands and the wine-bowl in the other, and was fresh 
and bright after the night’s repose. 

“ I will ride with you, with my Spahis,” she said, as a young 
queen might have promised protection from her escort. He 
thanked her, and sank back among the straw, exhausted and 
worn out with pain and with languor; the weight that seemed 
to oppress his chest was almost as hard to bear as when the 
actual pressure of his dead charger’s body had been on him. 

Yet, as he had said, it was but a bagatelle beside the all but 
mortal wounds, the agonizing neuralgia, the prostrating fever, 
the torture of bullet-torn nerves, and the scorching fire of in- 
flamed sword-wounds that had in their turn been borne by him 
in his twelve years of African service — things which, to men 
who have never suffered them, sound like the romanced horrors 
of an exaggerated imagination; yet things which are daily and 
quietly borne, by such soldiers as the soldiers of the Algerian 
Army, as the natural accompaniments of a military life — borne, 
too, in brave, simple, unconscious heroism by men who know 
well that the only reward for it will be their own self-content- 
ment at having been true to the traditions of their regiment. 

Four other troopers were placed on the straw beside him, and 
the mule-carts with their mournful loads rolled slowly out of 
camp, eastward toward the quarters of the main army; the 
Spahis, glowing red against the sun, escorting them, with their 
darling in their midst; while from their deep chests they 
shouted war songs in Sabir, with all the wild and riotous delight 
that the triumph of victory and the glow of bloodshed roused 
in those who combined in them the fire of France and the 
fanaticism of Islamism — an irresistible union. 

Though the nights were now cold, and before long even the 
advent of snow might be looked for, the days were hot and even 
scorching still. Cigarette and her Spahis took no heed of it; 
they were desert born and bred; and she was well-nigh invul- 
nerable to heat as any little salamander. But, although they 
were screened as well as they could be under an improvised 
awning, the wounded men suffered terribly. Gnats and mos- 
quitoes and all the winged things of the African air tormented 
them, and tossing on the dry, hot straw they grew delirious; 
some falling asleep and murmuring incoherently, others lying 
with wide-open eyes of half-senseless, straining misery. Ciga- 

$ 


THE LEATHERN ZACKRIST. 


427 


rette had known well how it would be with them; she had ac- 
companied such escorts many a time; and ever and again when 
they halted she dismounted and came to them, and mixed wine 
with some water that she had slung a barrel of to her saddle, 
and gave it to them, and moved their bandages, and spoke to 
them with a soft, caressing consolation that pacified them as 
if by some magic. She had led them like a young lion on to 
the slaughter in the past day; she soothed them now with a 
gentleness that the gentlest daughter of the Church could not 
have surpassed. 

The way was long; the road ill formed, leading for the most 
part across a sear and desolate country, with nothing to re- 
lieve its barrenness except long stretches of the great spear- 
headed reeds. At noon the heat was intense; the little caval- 
cade halted for half an hour under the shade of some black, 
towering rocks which broke the monotony of the district, and 
commenced a more hilly and more picturesque portion of the 
country. Cigarette came to the side of the temporary ambulance 
in which Cecil was placed. He was asleep — sleeping for once 
peacefully, with little trace of pain upon his features, as he 
had slept the previous night. She saw that his face and chest 
had not been touched by the stinging insect-swarm; he was 
doubly screened by a shirt hung above him dexterously on some 
bent sticks. 

“ Who has done that ? ” thought Cigarette. As she glanced 
round she saw — without any linen to cover him, Zackrist had 
reared himself up and leaned slightly forward over against his 
comrade. The shirt that protected Cecil was his; and on his 
own bare shoulders and mighty chest the tiny armies of the 
flies and gnats were fastened, doing their will, uninterrupted. 

As he caught her glance a sullen, ruddy glow of shame shone 
through the black, hard skin of his sun-burned visage — shame 
to which he had been never touched when discovered in any one 
of his guilty and barbarous actions. 

“ Dame ! ” he growled savagely — “ he gave me his wine ; one 
must do something in return. Hot that I feel the insects — not 
I; my skin is leather, see you! they can’t get through it; but 
his is une peau de femme — white and soft — bah! like tissue- 
paper ! ” 

“I see, Zackrist; you are right. A French soldier can never 
take a kindness from an English fellow without outrunning him 
in generosity. Look — here is some drink for you.” 


428 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


She knew too well the strange nature with which she had 
to deal to say a syllable of praise to him for his self-devotion, 
or to appear to see that, despite his boast of his leather skin, 
the stings of the cruel, winged tribes were drawing his blood 
and causing him alike pain and irritation which, under that 
sun, and added to the torment of his gunshot-wound, were a 
martyrdom as great as the noblest saint ever endured. 

“ Tiens — tiens! I did him wrong,” murmured Cigarette. 
“ That is what they are — the children of France — even when 
they are at their worst, like that devil, Zackrist. Who dare 
say they are not the heroes of the world ? ” 

And all through the march she gave Zackrist a double por- 
tion of her water dashed with red wine, that was so welcome 
and so precious to the parched and aching throats; and all 
through the march Cecil lay asleep, and the man who had 
thieved from him, the man whose soul was stained with murder, 
and pillage, and rapine, sat erect beside him, letting the in- 
sects suck his veins and pierce his flesh. 

It was only when they drew near the camp of the main army 
that Zackrist beat off the swarm and drew his old shirt over 
his head. “ You do not want to say anything to him,” he mut- 
tered to Cigarette. “ I am of leather, you know ; I have not 
felt it.” 

She nodded; she understood him. Yet his shoulders and hia 
chest were well-nigh flayed, despite the tough and horny skin of 
which he made his boast. 

“ Dieu ! we are droll ! ” mused Cigarette. “ If we do a good 
thing, we hide it as if it were a bit of stolen meat, we are so 
afraid it should be found out; but, if they do one in the world 
there, they bray it at the tops of their voices from the houses* 
roofs, and run all down the streets screaming about it, for fear 
it should be lost. Dieu ! we are droll ! ” 

And she dashed the spurs into her mare and galloped off 
at the height of her speed into camp — a very city of canvas, 
buzzing with the hum of life, regulated with the marvelous 
skill and precision of French warfare, yet with the carelessness 
and the picturesqueness of the desert-life pervading it. 

“ C’est la Cigarette ! ” ran from mouth to mouth, as the bay 
mare with her little Amazon rider, followed by the scarlet cloud 
of the Spahis, all ablaze like poppies in the sun, rose in sight, 
thrown out against the azure of the skies. 

What she had done had been told long before by an orderly* 


THE LEATHERN ZACKRIST. 


429 


riding hard in the early night to take the news of the battle; 
and the whole host was on watch for its darling — the savior 
of the honor of France. Like wave rushing on wave of some 
tempestuous ocean, the men swept out to meet her in one great, 
surging tide of life, impetuous, passionate, idolatrous, exultant; 
with all the vivid ardor, all the uncontrolled emotion, of natures 
south-born, sun-nurtured. They broke away from their midday 
rest as from their military toil, moved as by one swift breath 
of fire, and flung themselves out to meet her, the chorus of a 
thousand voices ringing in deafening vivas to the skies. She 
was enveloped in that vast sea of eager, furious lives; in that 
dizzy tumult of vociferous cries and stretching hands and up- 
turned faces. As her soldiers had done the night before, so 
these did now — kissing her hands, her dress, her feet; sending 
her name in thunder through the sunlit air; lifting her from 
off her horse, and bearing her, in a score of stalwart arms, tri- 
umphant in their midst. 

She was theirs — their own — the Child of the Army, the Little 
One whose voice above their dying brethren had the sweetness 
of an angel’s song, and whose feet, in their hours of revelry, 
flew like the swift and dazzling flight of gold-winged orioles. 
And she had saved the honor of their Eagles; she had given 
to them and to France their god of Victory. They loved her — 
O God, how they loved her! — with that intense, breathless, in- 
toxicating love of a multitude which, though it may stone 
to-morrow what it adore to-day, has yet for those on whom it 
has once been given thus a power no other love can know — a 
passion unutterably sad, deliriously strong. 

That passion moved her strangely. 

As she looked down upon them, she knew that not one man 
breathed among that tumultuous mass but would have died 
that moment at her word; not one mouth moved among that 
countless host but breathed her name in pride, and love, and 
honor. 

She might be a careless young coquette, a lawless little 
brigand, a child of sunny caprices, an elf of dauntless mischief ; 
but she was more than these. The divine fire of genius had 
touched her, and Cigarette would have perished for her coun- 
try not less surely than Jeanne d’Arc. The holiness of an im- 
personal love, the glow of an imperishable patriotism, the 
melancholy of a passionate pity for the concrete and unnum- 
bered sufferings of the people were in her, instinctive and in- 


430 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


born, as fragrance in the heart of flowers. And all these to- 
gether moved her now, and made her young face beautiful as 
she looked down upon the crowding soldiery. 

“ It was nothing,” she answered them — “ it was nothing. It 
was for France.” 

For France! They shouted back the beloved word with ten- 
fold joy; and the great sea of life beneath her tossed to and 
fro in stormy triumph, in frantic paradise of victory, ringing 
her name with that of France upon the air, in thunder-shouts 
like spears of steel smiting on shields of bronze. 

But she stretched her hand out, and swept it backward to 
the desert-border of the south with a gesture that had awe for 
them. 

“ Hush ! ” she said softly, with an accent in her voice that 
hushed the riot of their rejoicing homage till it lulled like the 
lull in a storm. “ Give me no honor while they sleep yonder. 
With the dead lies the glory! ” 


CHAPTER XXIX. 


BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE. 

“Le Roi Gaillard qui s’appelle la Guerre, 

C’est mon souverain tout debonnair ; 

Au bouche qui rit, au main qui tue, 

Au front d’airain, aux yeux de feu! 

Comme il est beau ce roi si gai, 

Qui fait le diable k quatre au gr£, 

Qui brftle, qui boit, qui foudre, qui fume, 

Qui aime levin, le sang, l’£cume, 

Qui jette la torche 

“ Hola ! nous v’la ! ” cried Cigarette, interrupting herself in 
her chant in honor of the attributes of war, as the T.ringlo’s 
mules which she was driving, some three weeks after the fray 
of Zaraila, stopped, by sheer force of old habit, in the middle 
of a green plateau on the outskirts of a camp pitched in its 
center, and overlooked by brown, rugged scarps of rock, with 
stunted bushes on their summits, and with here and there a 
maritime pine clinging to their naked slopes. At sight of the 
food-laden little beasts, and the well-known form behind them, 
the Tirailleurs, Indigenes, and the Zouaves, on whose side of 
the encampment she had approached, rushed toward her with 
frantic shouts, and wild delight, and vehement hurrahs in a 
tempest of vociferous welcome that might have stunned any 
ears less used, and startled any nerves less steeled, to military 
life than the Friend of the Flag’s. She signed back the shout- 
ing, disorderly crowd with her mule-whip, as superbly as though 
she were a Marshal of France signing back a whole army’s 
mutiny. 

“ What children you are! You push, and scramble, and tear, 
like a set of monkeys over a nut. Get out of my way, or I 
swear you shall none of you have so much as a morsel of black 
bread — do you hear ! ” 

It was amusing to see how they minded her contemptuous 
orders; how these black-bearded fire-eaters, the terror of the 
country, each one of whom could have crushed her in his grasp 
as a wolf crushes a lamb, slunk back, silenced and obedient, be- 

431 


432 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


fore the imperious bidding of the little vivandiere. They had 
heeded her and let her rule over them almost as much when 
she had been seven years old, and her curls, now so dark, had 
been yellow as corn in the sun. 

“ Ouf ! ” growled only one insubordinate, “ if you had been a 
day and night eating nothing but a bit of moist clay, you might 
be hungry too, fanf an ? ” 

The humiliated supplication of the reply appeased their au- 
tocratic sovereign. She nodded her head in assent. 

“ I know ; I know. I have gone days on a handful of baHey- 
ears. M. le Colonel has his marmitons, and his fricassees, and 
his batterie de cuisine where he camps — ho, he ! — but we 
soldiers have nothing but a hunch of baked chaff. Well, we 
win battles on it — eh ? ‘ Quand la panse est vide, l’epee mange 
viter” 

Which was one of the impromptu proverbs that Cigarette 
was wont to manufacture and bring into her discourse with an 
air of authority as of one who quotes from profound scholastic 
lore. It was received with a howl of applause and of ratifica- 
tion. The entrails often gnaw with bitter pangs of famine in 
the Army of Algiers, and they knew well how sharp an edge 
hunger gives to the steel. 

Nevertheless, the sullen, angry roar of famished men, that 
is so closely, so terribly like the roar of wild beasts, did not 
cease. 

“ Where is Biribi ? ” they growled. “ Biribi never keeps us 
waiting. Those are Biribi’s beasts.” 

“ Right,” said Cigarette laconically, with a crack of her mule- 
whip on to the arm of a Zouave who was attempting to make 
free* with her convoy and purloin a loaf off the load. 

“ Where is Biribi, then ? ” they roared in concert, a crowd of 
eager, wolfish, ravenous, impatient men, hungry as camp fast- 
ing could make them, and half inclined even to tear their dar- 
ling in pieces, since she kept them thus from the stores. 

Cigarette uncovered her head with a certain serious grace 
very rare in her. 

“ Biribi has made a good end.” 

Her assailants grew very quiet. 

“ Shot ? ” they asked briefly. Biribi was a Tringlo well be- 
loved in all the battalions. 

Cigarette nodded, with a gesture outward to the solitary 
country. She was accustomed to these incidents of war; she 



Photo by Fvron 





BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE. 


433 


thought of them no more than a girl of civilized life thinks of 
the grouse or the partridges that are killed by her lovers and 
brothers. 

“ I was out yonder, two leagues or more away. I was riding ; 
I was on my own horse; Etoile-Filante. Well, I heard shots; 
of course I made for the place by my ear. Before I got up I 
saw what was the mischief. There were the mules in a gorge, 
and Biribi in front of them, fighting, mon Dieu ! — fighting like 
the devil — with three Arbis upon him. They were trying to 
stop the convoys, and Biribi was beating them back with all 
his might. I was too far off to do much good ; but I shouted and 
dashed down to them. The Arbis heard, Biribi heard; he flew 
on to them like a tiger, that little Tringlo. It was wonderful! 
Two fell dead under him ; the third took fright and fled. When 
I got up, Biribi lay above the dead brutes with a dozen wounds 
in him, if there were one. He looked up, and knew me. ‘ Is it 
thee, Cigarette?’ he asked; and he could hardly speak for the 
blood in his throat. ‘ Do not wait with me ; I am dead already. 
Drive the mules into camp as quick as thou canst; the men will 
he thinking me late.’ ” 

“ Biribi was always bon enfant,” muttered the listening 
throng; they forgot their hunger as they heard. 

“ Ah, chenapans ! he thought more of you than you deserve, 
you jackals! I drew him aside into a hole in the rocks out of 
the heat. He was dead; he was right. Ho man could live, 
slashed about like that. The Arbicos had set on him as he went 
singing along; if he would have given up the brutes and the 
stores, they would not have harmed him; but that was not 
Biribi. I did all I could for him. Dame! it was no good. He 
lay very still for some minutes with his head on my lap; then 
he moved restlessly and tossed about. ‘ They will think me so 
late — so late,’ he muttered ; ‘ and they are famished by this. 
There is that letter, too, from his mother for Petit-Pot-de- 
Terre; there is all that news from France; I have so much for 
them, and I shall be so late — so late ! ’ All he thought was that 
he should be so late into camp. Well, it was all over very soon. 
I do not think he suffered ; but he was so afraid you should not 
have the food. I left him in the cave, and drove the mules 
on as he asked. Etoile-Filante had galloped away; have you 
seen him home ? ” 

There broke once more from the hearkening throng a roar 
that shook the echoes from the rocks; but it was not now the 


434 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


rage of famished longing, but the rage of the lust for vengeance, 
and the grief of passionate hearts blent together. Quick as 
the lightning flashes, their swords leaped from their scabbards 
and shook in the sun-lighted air. 

“We will avenge him!” they shouted as with one throat, 
the hoarse cry rolling down the valley like a swell of thunder. 
If the bonds of discipline had loosed them, they would have 
rushed forth on the search and to the slaughter, forgetful of 
hunger, of heat, of sun-stroke, of self-pity, of all things, save 
the dead Tringlo, whose only fear in death had been lest they 
should want and suffer through him. 

Their adjutants, alarmed by the tumult, hurried to the spot, 
fearing a bread riot; for the camp was far from supplies, and 
had been ill victualed for several days. They asked rapidly 
what was the matter. 

“ Biribi has been killed,” some soldier answered. 

“ Ah ! and the bread not come ? ” 

“Yes, mon adjutant; the bread is there, and Cigarette too.” 

“ There is no need for me, then,” muttered the adjutant of 
Zouaves ; “ the Little One will keep order.” 

The Little One had before now quelled a mutiny with her 
pistol at the ringleader’s forehead, and her brave, scornful 
words scourging the insubordinates for their dishonor to their 
arms, for their treason to the Tricolor; and she was equal to the 
occasion now. She lifted her right hand. 

“ We will avenge him. That is of course. The Flag of 
France never hangs idly when there is a brave life’s loss to be 
reckoned for ; I shall know again the cur that fled. Trust to me, 
and now be silent. You bawl out your oath of vengeance, oh, 
yes! But you bawled as loud a minute ago for bread. Biribi 
loved you better than you deserved. You deserve nothing; you 
are hounds, ready to tear for offal to eat as to rend the foe of 
your dead friend. Bah ! ” 

The roar of the voices sank somewhat; Cigarette had sprung 
aloft on a gun-carriage, and as the sun shone on her face it was 
brilliant with the scorn that lashed them like whips. 

“ Sang de Dieu ! ” fiercely swore a Zouave. “ Hounds, in- 
deed ! If it were anyone but you ! When one has had nothing 
but a snatch of raw bullock’s meat, and a taste of coffee black 
with mud, for a week through, is one a hound because one 
hungers ? ” 

“ No,” said the orator from her elevation, and her eyes 


BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE. 


435 


softened wonderfully. In her heart she loved them so well, these 
wild, barbaric warriors that she censured — “ no, one is not a 
hound because one hungers ; but one is not a soldier if one com- 
plains. Well! Biribi loved you; and I am here to do his will, 
to do his work. He came laden; his back was loaded heavier 
than the mules’. To the front, all of you, as I name you! 
Petit-Pot-de-Terre, there is your old mother’s letter. If she 
knew as much as I do about you, scapegrace, she would never 
trouble herself whether you were dead or alive ! Fagotin ! here 
is a bundle of Paris newspapers for you; they are quite new — 
only nine months old! Potele! some woman has sent you a 
love-scrawl and some tobacco ; I suppose she knew your passions 
all ended in smoke ! Rafle ! here is a little money come for you 
from France; it has not been stolen, so it will have no spice 
for you ! Racoleur ! here is a poulet * from some simpleton, 
with a knife as a souvenir ; sharpen it on the Arbicos. Poupard, 
Loup-terrible, Jean Pagnote, Pince-Maille, Louis Magot, Jules 
Goupil — here! There are your letters, your papers, your com- 
missions. Biribi forgot nothing. As if you deserved to be 
worked for or thought of, sacripants ! ” 

With which reproach Cigarette relieved herself of the cer- 
tain pain that was left on her by the death of Biribi; she al- 
ways found that to work yourself into a passion with somebody 
is the very best way in the world to banish an unwelcome 
emotion. 

The men summoned by their camp-sobriquets, which were 
so familiar that they had, many of them, fairly forgotten their 
original names, rallied around her to receive the various packets 
with which a Tringlo is commonly charged by friends in' the 
towns, or relatives away in France, for the soldiers of African 
brigades, and which, as well as his convoy of food and his budget 
of news, render him so precious and so welcome an arrival at 
an encampment. The dead Biribi had been one of the lightest, 
brightest, cheeriest, and sauciest of the gay, kindly, industri- 
ous wanderers of his branch of the service; always willing to 
lend ; always ready to help ; always smoking, singing, laughing, 
chattering; treating his three mules as an indulgent mother her 
children; calling them Plick, Plack, et Plock, and thinking of 
Plick, Plack, et Plock far beyond himself at all times ; a merry, 
busy, smiling, tender-hearted soul, who was always happy, 
trudging along the sunburned road, and caroling in his joyous 
* Love-billet. 


436 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


voice chansonnettes and gaudrioles to the African flocks and 
herds, amid the African solitudes. If there were a man they 
loved, it was Biribi; Biribi, whose advent in camp had always 
been the signal for such laughter, such abundance, such 
showers of newspapers, such quantities of intelligence from that 
France for tidings of which the hardest-featured veteran among 
them would ask with a pang at the heart, with a thrill in the 
words. And they had sworn, and would keep what they had 
sworn in bitter intensity, to avenge him to the uttermost point 
of vengeance. Yet five minutes afterward when the provisions 
Plick, Plack, et Plock had brought were divided and given out, 
they were shouting, eating, singing, devouring, with as eager a 
zest, and as hearty an enjoyment, as though Biribi were among 
them, and did not lie dead two leagues away, with a dozen 
wounds slashed on his stiffening frame. 

“ What heartless brutes ! Are they always like that ? ” mut- 
tered a gentleman painter who, traveling through the interior 
to get military sketches, had obtained permission to take up 
quarters in the camp. 

“ If they were not like that they could not live a day,” a 
voice answered curtly, behind him. “ Do you know what this 
service is, that you venture to judge them? Men who meet 
death in the face every five minutes they breathe cannot afford 
the space for sentimentalism which those who saunter at ease 
and in safety can do. They laugh when we are dead, perhaps, 
but they are true as steel to us while we live — it is the reverse 
of the practice of the world ! ” 

The tourist started, turned, and looked aghast at the man 
who had reproved him; it was a Chasseur d’Afrique, who, hav- 
ing spoken, was already some way onward, moving through the 
press and tumult of the camp to his own regiment’s portion 
of it. 

Cigarette, standing by to see that Plick, Plack, and Plock 
were properly baited on the greenest forage to be found, heard, 
and her eyes flashed with a deep delight. 

“ Dame ! ” she thought, “ I could not have answered better 
myself ! He is a true soldier, that.” And she forgave Cecil all 
his sins to her with the quick, impetuous, generous pardon of 
her warm little Gallic heart. 

Cigarette believed that she could hate very bitterly; indeed, 
her power of resentment she rated high among her grandest 
qualities. Had the little leopard been told that she could not 


BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE. 


437 

resent to the death what offended her, she would have held her- 
self most infamously insulted. Yet hate was, in truth, foreign 
to her frank, vivacious nature; its deadliness never belonged 
to her, if its passion might; and at a trait akin to her, at a 
flash of sympathetic spirit in the object of her displeasure, 
Cigarette changed from wrath to friendship with the true in- 
stinct of her little heart of gold. A heart which, though it had 
been tossed about on a sea of blood, and had never been graven 
with so much as one tender word or one moral principle from 
the teachings of any creature, was still gold, despite all; no 
matter the bruises and the stains and the furnace-heats that 
had done their best to harden it into bronze, to debase it into 
brass. 

The camp was large, and a splendid picture of color, move- 
ment, picturesque combination, and wonderful light and 
shadow, as the sun-glow died out and the fires were lighted; 
for the nights were now intensely cold — cold with the cutting, 
icy, withering bise, and clear above as an Antarctic night, 
though the days were still hot and dry as flame. 

On the left were the Tirailleurs, the Zouaves, the Zephyrs; 
on the right were the Cavalry and the Artillery; in the center 
of all was the tent of the Chief. Everywhere, as evening fell, 
the red warmth of fires rose; the caldron of soup or of coffee 
simmered, gypsy-like, above; the men lounged around, talking, 
laughing, cooking, story-telling at their pleasure; after the 
semi-starvation of the last week, the abundance of stores that 
had come in with other Tringlos besides poor Biribi caused a 
universal hilarity. The glitter of accouterments, the contents 
of open knapsacks, the skins of animals just killed for the mar- 
mite, the boughs of pines broken for firewood, strewed the 
ground. Tethered horses, stands of arms, great drums and 
eagle-guidons, the looming darkness of huge cannon, the black- 
ness, like dromedaries couched, of caissons and ambulance- 
wagons, the whiteness of the canvas tents, the incessant move- 
ment as the crowds of soldiery stirred, and chattered, and 
worked, and sang — all these, on the green level of the plain, 
framed in by the towering masses of the rugged rocks, made a 
picture of marvelous effect and beauty. 

Cecil, looking at it, thought so; though the harsh and bitter 
misery which he knew that glittering scene enfolded, and which 
he had suffered so many years himself — misery of hunger, of 
cold, of shot-wounds, of racking bodily pains — stole from it. 


438 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


in his eyes, that poetry and that picturesque brilliancy which 
it bore to the sight of the artist and the amateur. He knew 
the naked terrors of war, the agony, the travail, the icy chills, 
the sirocco heats, the grinding routine, the pitiless chastise- 
ments of its reality; to those who do, it can no longer be a 
spectacle dressed in the splendid array of romance. It is a 
fearful tragedy and ftirce woven close one in another; and its 
sole joy is in that blood- thirst which men so lustfully share 
with the tiger, and yet shudder from when they have sated it. 

It was this knowledge of jvar, in its bitter and deadly truth, 
which had made him give the answer that had charmed Ciga- 
rette, to the casual visitor of the encampment. 

He sat now, having recovered from the effects of the day 
of Zaraila within a little distance of the fire at which his men 
were stewing some soup in the great simmering copper bowl. 
They had eaten nothing for nigh a week, except some moldy 
bread, with the chance of a stray cat or a shot bird to flavor 
it. Hunger was a common thorn in Algerian warfare, since not 
even the matchless intendance of France could regularly supply 
the troops across those interminable breadths of arid land, those 
sun-scorched plains, swept by Arab foragers. 

“ Beau Victor ! you took their parts well,” said a voice behind 
him, as Cigarette vaulted over a pile of knapsacks and stood 
in the glow of the fire, with a little pipe in her pretty rosebud 
mouth and her cap set daintily on one side of her curls. 

He looked up, and smiled. 

“ Hot so well as your own clever tongue would have done. 
Words are not my weapons.” 

“Ho! You are as silent as the grave commonly; but when 
you do speak, you speak well,” said the vivandiere-Demosthenes 
condescendingly. “ I hate silence myself ! Thoughts are very 
good grain, but if they are not whirled round, round, round, 
and winnowed and ground in the millstones of talk, they keep 
little, hard, useless kernels, that not a soul can digest.” 

With which metaphor Cigarette blew a cloud of smoke into 
the night air, looking the prettiest little genre picture in the 
ruddy firelight that ever was painted on such a background of 
wavering shadow and undulating flame. 

“Will your allegory hold good, petite?” smiled Cecil, think- 
ing but little of his answer or of his companion, of whose service 
to him he remained utterly ignorant. “ I fancy speech is the 
chaff most generally, little better. So, they talk of you for 


BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE. 439 

the Cross? No soldier ever, of a surety, more greatly de- 
served it.” 

Her eyes gleamed with a luster like the African planets above 
her; her face caught all the fire, the light, the illumination of 
the flames flashing near her. 

“ I did nothing,” she said curtly. “ Any man on the field 
would have done the same.” 

“ That is easy to say ; not so easy to prove. In all great 
events there may be the same strength, courage, and desire to 
act greatly in those who follow as in the one that leads; but 
it is only in that one that there is also the daring to originate, 
the genius to seize aright the moment of action and of 
success.” 

Cigarette was a little hero; she was, moreover, a little des- 
perado; but she was a child in years and a woman at heart, 
valiant and ruthless young soldier though she might be. She 
colored all over her mignonne face at the words of eulogy from 
this man whom she had told herself she hated; her eyes filled; 
her lips trembled. 

“It was nothing,” she said softly, under her breath. “I 
would die twenty deaths for France.” 

He looked at her, and for the hour understood her aright; 
he saw that there was the love for her country and the power 
of sacrifice of a Viriathus or an Arminius in this gay-plumaged 
and capricious little hawk of the desert. 

“ You have a noble nature, Cigarette,” he said, with an 

earnest regard at her. “My poor child, if only ” He 

paused. He was thinking what it was hard to say to her — if 
only the accidents of her life had been different, what beauty, 
grace, and genius might have been developed out of the un- 
tamed, untutored, inconsequent, but glorious nature of the 
child-warrior. 

As by a fate, unconsciously his pity embittered all the delight 
his praise had given, and this implied regret for her stung her 
as the rend of the spur a young Arab colt — stung her inwardly 
into cruel wrath and pain; outwardly into irony, deviltry, and 
contemptuous retort. 

“Oh, he! Child, indeed! Was I a child the other day, my 
good fellow, when I saved your squadron from being cut to 
pieces like grass with a scythe? As for nobility? Pouf! Not 
much of that in me. I love France — yes. A soldier always loves 
his country. She is so brave, too, and so fair, and so riante. 


440 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


and so gay. Not like your Albion — if it is yours — who is a great 
gobemouche stuffed full of cotton, steaming with fog, clutching 
gold with one hand and the Bible with the other, that she may 
swell her money-bags, and seem a saint all the same; never 
laughing, never learning, always growling, always shuffling, 
who is like this spider — look! — a tiny body and huge, hairy 
legs — pull her legs, the Colonies, off, and leave her little English 
body, all shriveled and shrunk alone, and I should like to know 
what size she would be then, and how she would manage to 
swell and to strut ? ” 

Wherewith Cigarette tossed the spider into the air, with all 
the supreme disdain she could impel into that gesture. Ciga- 
rette, though she knew not her ABC, and could not have 
written her name to save her own life, had a certain bright 
intelligence of her own that caught up political tidings, and 
grasped at public subjects with a skill education alone will not 
bestow. One way and another she had heard most of the float- 
ing opinions of the day, and stored them up in her fertile brain 
as a bee stores honey into his hive by much as nature-given 
and unconscious an instinct as the bee’s own. 

Cecil listened, amused. 

“You little Anglophobist ! You have the tongue of a 
Voltaire! ” 

“Voltaire?” questioned Cigarette. “Voltaire! Let me see. 
I know that name. He was the man who championed Calas? 
who had a fowl in the pot for every poor wretch that passed his 
house? who was taken to the Pantheon by the people in the 
Revolution ? ” 

“ Yes. And the man whom the wise world pretends still to 
call without a heart or a God ! ” 

“ Chut ! He fed the poor, and freed the wronged. Better 
than pattering Paters, that ! ” said Cigarette, who thought a 
midnight mass at Notre Dame or a Salutation at the Made- 
leine a pretty coup de theatre enough, but who had for all 
churches and creeds a serene contempt and a fierce disdain. 
“ Go to the grandams and the children ! ” she would say, with 
a shrug of her shoulders, to a priest, whenever one in Algiers 
or Paris attempted to reclaim her; and a son of the Order of 
Jesus, famed for persuasiveness and eloquence, had been fairly 
beaten once when, in the ardor of an African missionary, he 
had sought to argue with the little Bohemian of the Tricolor, 
and had had his logic rent in twain, and his rhetoric scattered 


BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE. 441 

like dust, under the merciless home-thrusts and the sarcastic 
artillery of Cigarette’s replies and inquiries. 

“ Hola! ” she cried, leaving Voltaire for what took her fancy. 
“We talk of Albion — there is one of her sons. I detest your 
country, but, ma foi ! I must confess she breeds uncommonly 
handsome men.” 

She was a dilettante in handsome men; she nodded her head 
now to where, some yards off, at another of the camp-fires, stood, 
with some officers of the regiment, one of the tourists; a very 
tall, very fair man, with a gallant bearing, and a tawny beard 
that glittered to gold in the light of the flames. 

Cecil’s glance followed Cigarette’s. With a great cry he 
sprang to his feet and stood entranced, gazing at the stranger. 
She saw the startled amaze, the longing love, the agony of 
recognition, in his eyes; she saw the impulse in him to spring 
forward, and the shuddering effort with which the impulse was 
controlled. lie turned to her almost fiercely. 

“ He must not see me ! Keep him away — away, for God’s 
sake!” 

He could not leave his men; he was fettered there where 
his squadron was camped. He went as far as he could from 
the flame-light into the shadow, and thrust himself among the 
tethered horses. Cigarette asked nothing; comprehended at a 
glance w T ith all the tact of her nation; and sauntered forward 
to meet the officers of the regiment as they came up to the 
picket-fire with the yellow-haired English stranger. She knew 
how charming a picture there, with her hands lightly resting on 
her hips, and her bright face danced on by the ruddy fire-glow, 
she made ; she knew she could hold thus the attention of a whole 
brigade. The eyes of the stranger lighted on her, and his voice 
laughed in mellow music to his companions and ciceroni. 

“Your intendance is perfect; your ambulance is perfect; 
your camp-cookery is perfect, messieurs; and here you have 
even perfect beauty, too! Truly, campaigning must be pleasant 
work in Algeria ! ” 

Then he turned to her with compliments frank and gay, and 
full of a debonnaire grace that made her doubt he could be of 
Albion. 

Retort was always ready to her; and she kept the circle of 
officers in full laughter round the vedette-fire with a shower of 
repartee that would have made her fortune on the stage of 
the Chatelet or Folies Marigny. And every now and then 


442 TINDER TWO FLAGS. 

her glance wandered to the shadow where the horses were 
tethered. 

Bah ! why was she always doing him service ? She could not 
have told. “ Parcequ’ j’ suis bien bete,” said Cigarette mentally, 
with a certain fiery contempt for herself. 

Still she went on — and did it. 

It was a fantastic picture by the bright scarlet light of the 
camp-fire, with the Little One in her full glory of mirth and 
mischief, and her circle of officers laughing on her with admir- 
ing eyes ; nearest her the towering height of the English 
stranger, with the gleam of the flame in the waves of his leonine 
beard. 

Erom the darkness, where the scores of gray horses were 
tethered, Cecil’s eyes were riveted on it. There were none near 
to see him; had there been, they would have seen an agony in 
his eyes that no physical misery, no torture of the battlefield, 
had brought there. His face was bloodless, and his gaze 
strained through the gleam on to the fire-lit group with a pas- 
sionate intensity of yearning — he was well used to pain, well 
used to self-control, well used to self-restraint, but for the first 
time in his exile the bitterness of a struggle almost vanquished 
him. All the old love of his youth went out to this man, so 
near beside him, yet so hopelessly severed from him; looking 
on the face of his friend, a violence of longing shook him. 
“ O God, if I were dead ! ” he thought, “ they might know 
then ” 

He would have died gladly to have had that familiar hand 
once more touch his; those familiar eyes once more look on 
him with the generous, tender trust of old. 

His brain reeled, his thoughts grew blind, as he stood there 
among his horses, with the stir and tumult of the bivouac about 
him. There was nothing simpler, nothing less strange, than 
that an English soldier should visit the Franco- Arab camp; 
but to him it seemed like the resurrection of the dead. 

Whether it was a brief moment, or an hour through, that 
the circle stood about the great, black caldron that was swing- 
ing above the flames, he could not have told; to him it was an 
eternity. The echo of the mellow, ringing tones that he knew 
so well came to him from the distance, till his heart seemed 
breaking with but one forbidden longing — to look once more 
in those brave eyes that made every coward and liar quail, and 
say only, “ I was guiltless.” 


BY THE BIVOUAC EIRE. 


443 


It is bitter to know those whom we love dead; but it is more 
bitter to be as dead to those who, once having loved us, have 
sunk our memory deep beneath oblivion that is not the oblivion 
of the grave. 

A while, and the group broke up and was scattered ; the Eng- 
lish traveler throwing gold pieces by the score among the wait- 
ing troopers. “ A bientot ! ” they called to Cigarette, who 
nodded farewell to them with a cigar in her mouth, and busied 
herself pouring some brandy into the old copper caldron in 
which some black coffee and muddy water, three parts sand, was 
boiling. A few moments later, and they were out of sight 
among the confusion, the crowds, and the flickering shadows 
of the camp. When they were quite gone, she came softly to 
him; she could not see him well in the gloom, but she touched 
his hand. 

“ Dieu ! how cold you are ! He is gone.” 

He could not answer her to thank her, but he crushed in his 
the little, warm, brown palm. She felt a shiver shake his limbs. 

“ Is he your enemy ? ” she asked. 

“ Ho.” 

“What, then?” 

“ The man I love best on earth.” 

“ Ah ! ” She had felt a surprise she had not spoken that he 
should flee thus from any foe. “ He thinks you dead, then ? ” 

“ Yes.” 

“ And must always think so ? ” 

“Yes.” He held her hand still, and his own wrung it hard 
— the grasp of comrade to comrade, not of man to woman. 
“ Child, you are bold, generous, pitiful ; for God’s sake, get me 
sent out of this camp to-night. I am powerless.” 

There was that in the accent which struck his listener to the 
heart. He was powerless, fettered hand and foot as though he 
were a prisoner; a night’s absence, and he would be shot as a 
deserter. He had grown accustomed to this rendering up of 
all his life to the rules of others; but now and then the galled 
spirit chafed, the netted stag strained at the bonds. 

“ I will try,” said Cigarette simply, without anything of her 
audacity or of her vanity in the answer. “ Go you to the fire ; 
you are cold.” 

“ Are you sure he will not return ? ” 

“ Hot he. They are gone to eat and drink ; I go with them. 
What is it you fear ? ” 


444 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“ My own weakness.” 

She was silent. She could just watch his features by the 
dim light, and she saw his mouth quiver under the fullness of 
his beard. He felt that if he looked again on the face of the 
man he loved he might be broken into self-pity, and unloose his 
silence, and shatter all the work of so many years. He had 
been strong where men of harder fiber and less ductile temper 
might have been feeble ; but He never thought that he had been 
so; he only thought that he had acted on impulse, and had 
remained true to his act through the mere instinct of honor — 
an instinct inborn in his blood and his Order — an instinct nat- 
ural and unconscious with him as the instinct by which he drew 
his breath. 

“You are a fine soldier,” said Cigarette musingly; “such 
men are not weak.” 

“Why? We are only strong as tigers are strong — just the 
strength of the talon and fang. I do not know. I was weak 
as water once; I may be again, if — if ” 

He scarcely knew that he was speaking aloud; he had for- 
gotten her ! His whole heart seemed burned as with fire by the 
memory of that one face so familiar, so well loved, yet from 
which he must shrink as though some cowardly sin were be- 
tween them. The wretchedness on him seemed more than he 
could bear; to know that this man was so near that the sound 
of his voice raised could summon him, yet that he must remain 
as dead to him — remain as one dead after a craven and treacher- 
ous guilt. 

He turned suddenly, almost violently, upon Cigarette. 

“ You have surprised my folly from me; you know my secret 
so far ; but you are too brave to betray me, you are too generous 
to tell of this ? I can trust you to be silent ? ” 

Her face flushed scarlet with astonished anger; her little, 
childlike form grew instinct with haughty and fiery dig- 
nity. 

“Monsieur, that question from one soldier of France to an- 
other is insult. We are not dastards! ” 

There was a certain grave reproach that mingled with the 
indignant scorn of the answer, and showed that her own heart 
was wounded by the doubt, as well as her military pride by 
the aspersion. Even amid the conflict of pain at war in him 
he felt that, and hastened to soothe it. 

“ Forgive me, my child ; I should not have wronged you with 


BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE. 445 

the question. It is needless, I know. Men can trust you to 
the death, they say.” 

“To the death — yes.” 

The answer was thoughtful, dreamy, almost sad, for Ciga- 
rette. His thoughts were too far from her in their tumult of 
awakened memories to note the tone as he went rapidly on: 

“ You have ingenuity, compassion, tact; you have power here, 
too, in your way. For the love of Heaven get me sent out on 
some duty before dawn ! There is Biribi’s murder to be 
avenged — would they give the errand to me ? ” 

She thought a moment. 

“We will see,” she said curtly. “ I think I can do it. But 
go back, or you will be missed. I will come to you soon.” 

She left him then, rapidly; drawing her hand quickly out of 
the clasp of his. 

“ Que je suis bete! Que je suis bete!” said Cigarette to 
herself; for she felt her heart aching to its core for the sorrow 
of this man who was nothing to her. He did not know what 
she had done for him in his suffering and delirium; he did not 
know how she had watched him all that night through, when 
she was weary, and bruised, and thirsting for sleep ; he did not 
know; he held her hand as one comrade another’s, and never 
looked to see if her eyes were blue or were black, were laughing 
or tear-laden. And yet she felt pain in his pain; she was al- 
ways giving her life to his service. “ Que je suis bete ! Que 
je suis bete ! ” she murmured again. Many beside the little 
Friend of the Flag beat back as folly the noblest and purest 
thing in them. 

Cecil mechanically returned to the fire at which the men of 
his t.ribu were cooking their welcome supper, and sat down near 
them; rejecting, with a gesture, the most savory portion which, 
with their customary love and care for him, they were careful 
to select and bring to him. There had never been a time when 
they had found him fail to prefer them to himself, or fail to 
do them kindly service, if of such he had a chance; and they 
returned it with all that rough and silent attachment that can 
be so strong and so stanch in lives that may be black with crime 
or red with slaughter. 

He sat like a man in a dream, while the loosened tongues of 
the men ran noisily on a hundred themes as they chaffed each 
other, exchanged a fire of bivouac jokes more racy than de- 
corous, and gave themselves to the enjoyment of their rude 


446 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


meal, that had to them that savor which long hunger alone can 
give. Their voices came dull on his ear; the ruddy warmth 
of the fire was obscured to his sight; the din, the laughter, 
the stir all over the great camp, at the hour of dinner were lost 
on him. He was insensible to everything except the innumera- 
ble memories that thronged upon him, and the aching long- 
ing that filled his heart with the sight of the friend of his 
youth. 

“ He said once that he would take my hand before all the 
world always, come what would,” he thought. “ Would he take 
it now, I wonder? Yes; he never believed against me.” 

And, as he thought, the same anguish of desire that had 
before smitten him to stand once more guiltless in the presence 
of men, and once more bear, untarnished, the name of his race 
and the honor of his fathers, shook him now as strong winds 
shake a tree that yet is fast rooted at its base, though it sway 
a while beneath the storm. 

“ How weak I am ! ” he thought bitterly. “ What does it 
matter? Life is so short, one is a coward indeed to fret over 
it. I cannot undo what I did. I cannot, if I would. To betray 
him now! God! not for a kingdom, if I had the chance! 
Besides, she may live still; and, even were she dead, to tarnish 
her name to clear my own would be a scoundrel’s baseness — 
baseness that would fail as it merited ; for who could be brought 
to believe me now ? ” 

The thoughts unformed drifted through his mind, half dulled,, 
half sharpened by the deadly pain, and the rush of old brotherly 
love that had arisen in him as he had seen the face of his friend 
beside the watch-fire of the French bivouac. It was hard; it 
was cruelly hard; he had, after a long and severe conflict, 
brought himself into contentment with his lot, and taught him- 
self oblivion of the past, and interest in the present, by active 
duties and firm resolve; he had vanquished all the habits, con- 
trolled most of the weaknesses, and banished nearly all the frail- 
ties and indulgences of his temperament in the long ordeal of 
African warfare. It was cruelly hard that now when he had 
obtained serenity, and more than half attained forgetfulness, 
these two — her face and his — must come before him; one to 
recall the past, the other to embitter the future ! 

As he sat with his head bent down and his forehead leaning 
on his arm, while the hard biscuit that served for a plate stood 
unnoticed beside him, with the food that the soldiers had placed 











Photo by Byron 





BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE. 


447 

on it, he did not hear Cigarette’s step till she touched him on 
the arm. Then he looked up; her eyes were looking on him 
with a tender, earnest pity. 

“ Hark ! I have done it,” she said gently. “ But it will be an 
errand very close to death that you must go on ” 

He raised himself erect, eagerly. 

“Ho matter that! Ah, mademoiselle, how I thank you!” 

“Chut! I am no Paris demoiselle!” said Cigarette, with a 
dash of her old acrimony. “ Ceremony in a camp — pouf ! You 
must have been a court chamberlain once, weren’t you? Well, 
I have done it. Your officers were talking yonder of a delicate 
business; they were uncertain who best to employ. I put in 
my speech — it was dead against military etiquette, but I did it. 
I, said to M. le General: ‘You want the best rider, the most 
silent tongue, and the surest steel in the squadrons ? Take Bel- 
a-f aire-peur, then.’ ‘ Who is that ? ’ asked the general ; he would 
have sent out of camp anybody but Cigarette for the inter- 
ruption. ‘ Mon General,’ said I, ‘ the Arabs asked that, too, the 
other day, at Zaraila.’ ‘ What ! ’ he cried, ‘ the man Victor — 
who held the ground with his Chasseurs? I know — a fine 
soldier. M. le Colonel, shall we send him ? ’ The Black Hawk 
had scowled thunder on you; he hates you more still since that 
affair of Zaraila, specially because the general has reported 
your conduct with such praise that they cannot help but pro- 
mote you. Well, he had looked thunder, but now he laughed. 
‘ Yes, mon General,’ he answered him, ‘ take him, if you like. 
It is fifty to one whoever goes on that business will not come 
back alive, and you will rid me of the most insolent fine gen- 
tleman in my squadrons.’ The general hardly heard him; he 
was deep in thought; but he asked a good deal about you from 
the Hawk, and Chateauroy spoke for your fitness for the errand 
they are going to send you on, very truthfully, for a wonder. 
I don’t know why; but he wants you to be sent, I think; most 
likely that you may be cut to pieces. And so they will send for 
you in a minute. I have done it as you wished, ‘le diable 
prend le fruit.’ ” 

There was something of her old brusquerie and recklessness in 
the closing sentences; but it had not her customary debonnaire 
lightness. She knew too well that the chances were as a hun- 
dred to one that he would never return alive from this service 
on which he had entreated to be dispatched. Cecil grasped both 
her hands in his with warm gratitude, that was still, like the 


448 UNDER TWO FLAGS. 

touch of his hands, the gratitude of comrade to comrade, not of 
man to woman. 

“ God bless you, Cigarette ! You are a true friend, my child. 
You have done me immeasurable benefits ” 

“ Oh, he ! I am a true friend,” said the Little One, some- 
what pettishly. She would have preferred another epithet. “ If 
a man wants to get shot as a very great favor, I always let him 
pleasure himself. Give a man his own way, if you wish to be 
kind to him. You are children, all of you, nothing but children, 
and if the toy that pleases you best is death, why — you must 
have it. Nothing else would content you. I know you. You 
always want what flies from you, and are tired of what lies to 
your hand. That is always a man.” 

“And a woman, too, is it not?” 

Cigarette shrugged her shoulders. 

“ Oh, I dare say! We love what is new — what is strange. We 
are humming-tops; we will only spin when we are fresh wound 
up with a string to our liking.” 

“ Make an exception of yourself, my child. You are always 
ready to do a good action, and never tire of that. From my 
heart I thank you. I wish to Heaven I could prove it better.” 

She drew her hands away from him. 

“ A great thing I have done, certainly ! Got you permis- 
sion to go and throw a cartel at old King Death ; that is all ! 
There! Loup- a-gr iff es-de-fer is coming to you. That is your 
summons.” 

The orderly so nicknamed approached, and brought the bid- 
ding of the general in command of the Cavalry for Cecil to 
render himself at once to his presence. These things brook no 
second’s delay in obedience; he went with a quick adieu to 
Cigarette, and the little Friend of the Flag was left in his va- 
cant place beside the fire. 

And there was a pang at her heart. 

“ Ten to one he goes to his death,” she thought. But Ciga- 
rette. volage little mischief though she was, could reach very 
high in one thing; she could reach a love that was unselfish, 
and one that was heroic. 

A few moments, and Cecil returned. 

“ Rake,” he said rapidly, in the F rench he habitually used, 
“ saddle my horse and your own. I am allowed to choose one of 
you to accompany me.” 

Rake, in paradise, and the envied of every man in the squad- 



Photo by Byron 































V 


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BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE. 


449 


rons, turned to his work — with him a task of scarce more than 
a second; and Cecil approached his little Friend of the Flag. 

“ My child, I cannot attempt to thank you. But for you, I 
should have been tempted to send my lance through my own 
heart.” 

“ Keep its lunge for the Arbicos, moii ami,” said Cigarette 
brusquely — the more brusquely because that new and bitter 
pang was on her. “ As for me, I want no thanks.” 

“No; you are too generous. But not the less do I ' wish I 
could render them more worthily than by words. If I live, I 
will try; if not, keep this in my memory. It is the only thing 
I have.” 

He put into her hand the ring she had seen in the little bon- 
bonniere; a ring of his mother’s that he had saved when he had 
parted with all else, and had put off his hand and into the box 
of Petite Heine’s gift the day he entered the Algerian army. 

Cigarette flushed scarlet with passions he could not under- 
stand, and she could not have disentangled. 

“ The ring of your mistress ! Not for me, if I know it ! Do 
you think I want to be paid ? ” 

“ The ring was my mother’s,” he answered her simply. “ And 
I offer it only en souvenir.” 

She lost all her hot color and all her fiery wrath; his grave 
and gentle courtesy always strangely stilled and rebuked her; 
but she raised the ring off the ground where she had flung it, 
and placed it back in his hand. 

“ If so, still less should you part with it. Keep it ; it will 
bring you happiness one day. As for me, I have done nothing ! ” 

“ You have done what I value the more for that noble dis- 
claimer. May I thank you thus, Little One ? ” 

He stooped and kissed her; a kiss that the lips of a man 
will always give to the bright, youthful lips of a woman, but 
a kiss, as she knew well, without passion, even without tender- 
ness in it. 

With a sudden impetuous movement, with a shyness and a 
refusal that had never been in her before, she wrested herself 
from him, her face burning, her heart panting, and plunged 
away from him into the depth of the shadow; and he never 
sought to follow her, but threw himself into saddle as his gray 
was brought up. Another instant, and, armed to the teeth, he 
rode out of the camp into the darkness of the silent, melan- 
choly, lonely Arab night. 


CHAPTER XXX. 


SEUL AU MONDE. 

The errand on which he went was one, as he was well aware, 
from which it were a thousand chances to one that he ever is- 
sued alive. 

It was to reach a distant branch of the Army of Occupation 
with dispatches for the chief in command there, and to do 
this he had to pass through a fiercely hostile region, occupied 
by Arabs with whom no sort of peace had ever been made, the 
most savage as well as the most predatory of the wandering 
tribes. His knowledge of their tongue, and his friendship with 
some men of their nation, would avail him nothing here; for 
their fury against the Franks was intense, and it was said that 
all prisoners who had fallen into their hands had been put to 
death with merciless barbarities. This might be true or un- 
true; wild tales were common among Algerian campaigners; 
whichever it were, he thought little of it as he rode out on to 
the lonely plains. Every kind of hazardous adventure and 
every variety of peril had been familiar with him in this 
African life; and now there were thoughts and memories on 
him which deadened every recollection of merely physical risk. 

“ We must ride as hard and as fast as we can, and as si- 
lently,” were the only words he exchanged with Rake, as he 
loosened his gray to a hand-gallop. 

“ All right, sir,” answered the trooper, whose warm blood 
was dancing, and whose blue eyes were alive like fire with de- 
light. That he had been absent on a far-away foraging raid 
on the day of Zaraila had been nothing short of agony to Rake, 
and the choice made of him for this duty was to him a gift 
of paradise. He loved fighting for fighting’s sake; and to be 
beside Cecil was the greatest happiness life held for him. 

They had two hundred miles to traverse, and had received 
only the command he had passed to Rake, to ride “ hard, fast, 
and silently.” To the hero of Zaraila the general had felt too 
much soldierly sympathy to add the superfluous injunction to 

450 


SEUL ATT MONDE. 


451 


do his uttermost to carry safely and successfully to their desti- 
nation the papers that were placed in his sabertasche. He 
knew well that the errand would be done, or the Chasseurs 
main de femme, mais main de fer would be stiffened and nerve- 
less in death. 

It was just nightfall; the after-glow had faded only a few 
moments before. Giving their horses, which they were to 
change once, ten hours for the distance, and two for bait and 
for rest, he reckoned that they would reach the camp before the 
noon of the coming day, as the beasts, fresh and fast in the 
camp, flew like greyhounds beneath them. 

Another night ride that they had ridden together came to 
the minds of both; but they spoke not a word as they swept on, 
their sabers shaken loose in their sheaths, their lances well 
gripped, and the pistols with which they had been supplied 
sprung in their belts, ready for instant action if a call should 
come for it. Every rood of the way was as full of unseen 
danger as if laid over mines. They might pass in safety; they 
might any moment be cut down by ten score against two. F rom 
every hanging scarp of rugged rock a storm of musket-balls 
might pour; from every screen of wild-fig foliage a shower of 
lances might whistle through the air; from every darkling 
grove of fir trees an Arab band might spring and swoop on 
them; but the knowledge scarcely recurred to the one save to 
make him shake his sword more loose for quick disengagement, 
and only made the sunny blue eyes of the other sparkle with 
a vivid and longing zest. 

The night grew very chill as it wore on; the north wind 
rose, rushing against them with a force and icy touch that 
seemed to freeze their bones to the marrow after the heat of 
the day and the sun that had scorched them so long. There 
was no regular road; they went across the country, their way 
sometimes leading over level land, over which they swept like 
lightning, great plains succeeding one another with wearisome 
monotony; sometimes, on the contrary, lying through ravines, 
and defiles, and gloomy woods, and broken, hilly spaces, where 
rent, bare rocks were thrown on one another in gigantic con- 
fusion, and the fantastic shapes of the wild fig and the dwarf 
palm gathered a hideous grotesqueness in the darkness. For 
there was no moon, and the stars were often hidden by the 
storm-rack of leaden clouds that drifted over the sky; and the 
only sound they heard was the cry of the jackal, or the shriek 


452 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


of the night bird, and now and then the sound of shallow 
water-courses, where the parched beds of hidden brooks had 
been filled by the autumnal rain. 

The first five-and-twenty miles passed without interruption, 
and the horses lay well and warmly to their work. They halted 
to rest and bait the beasts in a rocky hollow, sheltered from 
the blasts of the bise, and green with short, sweet grass, sprung 
up afresh after the summer drought. 

“ Do you ever think of him, sir ? ” said Rake softly, with a 
lingering love in his voice, as he stroked the grays and tethered 
them. 

“ Of whom?” 

“ Of the King, sir. If he’s alive, he’s gettin’ a rare old horse 
now.” 

“ Think of him ! I wish I did not, Rake.” 

“Wouldn’t you like to see him agen, sir?” 

“ What folly to ask! You know ” 

“ Yes, sir, I know,” said Rake slowly. “ And I know — least- 
ways I picked it out of a old paper — that your elder brother 
died, sir, like the old lord, and Mr. Berk’s got the title.” 

Rake had longed and pined for an opportunity to dare say 
this thing which he had learned, and which he could not tell 
whether or no Cecil knew likewise. His eyes looked with 
straining eagerness through the gloom into his master’s ; he was 
uncertain how his words would be taken. To his bitter disap- 
pointment, Cecil’s face showed no change, no wonder. 

“ I have heard that,” he said calmly — as calmly as though 
the news had no bearing on his fortunes, but was some 
stranger’s history. 

“ Well, sir, but he aint the lord! ” pleaded Rake passionately. 
“ He won’t never be while you’re living, sir ! ” 

“ Oh, yes, he is ! I am dead, you know.” 

“ But he won’t, sir! ” reiterated Rake. “ You’re Lord Royal- 
lieu if ever there was a Lord Royallieu, and if ever there will 
be one.” 

“ You mistake. An outlaw has no civil rights, and can claim 
none.” 

The man looked very wistfully at him; all these years 
through he had never learned why his master was thus “ dead ” 
in Africa, and he had too loyal a love and faith ever to ask, 
or ever to doubt but that Cecil was the wronged and not the 
wrong-doer. 



Photo by Sarony 





SEUL AU MONDE. 453 

“ You aint a outlaw, sir,” he muttered. “ You could take 
the title, if you would.” 

“ Oh, no ! I left England under a criminal charge. I should 
have to disprove that before I could inherit.” 

Rake crushed bitter oaths into muttered words as he heard. 
u You could disprove it, sir, of course, right and away, if you 
chose.” 

“ No ; or I should not have come here. Let us leqve the 
subject. It was settled long ago. My brother is Lord Royal- 
lieu. I would not disturb him, if I had the power, and I have 
not it. Look, the horses are taking well to their feed.” 

Rake asked him no more. He had never had a harsh word 
from Cecil in their lives; but he knew him too well, for all 
that, to venture to press on him a question thus firmly put 
aside. But his heart ached sorely for his master; he would so 
gladly have seen “ the king among his own again,” and would 
have striven for the restoration as strenuously as ever a Cava- 
lier strove for the White Rose ; and he sat in silence, perplexed 
and ill satisfied, under the shelter of the rock, with the great, 
dim, desolate African landscape stretching before him, with 
here and there a gleam of light upon it when the wind swept 
the clouds apart. His volatile speech was chilled, and his 
buoyant spirits were checked. That Cecil was justly outlawed 
he would have thought it the foulest treason to believe for one 
instant; yet he felt that he might as soon seek to wrench up 
the great stones above him from their base as seek to change 
the resolution of this man, whom he had once known pliant 
as a reed and careless as a child. 

They were before long in saddle again and off, the country 
growing wilder at each stride the horses took. 

“ It is all alive with Arabs for the next ten leagues,” said 
Cecil, as he settled himself in his saddle. “ They have come 
northward and been sweeping the country like a locust-swarm, 
and we shall blunder on some of them sooner or later. If 
they cut me down, don’t wait; but slash my sabertasche loose 
and ride off with it.” 

“ All right, sir,” said Rake obediently ; but he thought to 
himself, “ Leave you alone with them demons ? Damn me if 
I will!” 

And away they went once more, in speed and in silence, the 
darkness of full night closing in on them, the skies being black 
with the heavy drift of rising storm-clouds. 


454 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


Meantime Cigarette was feasting with the officers of the regi- 
ment. The dinner was the best that the camp-scullions could 
furnish in honor of the two or three illustrious tourists who 
were on a visit to the headquarters of the Algerian Army; and 
the Little One, the heroine of Zaraila, and the toast of every 
mess throughout Algeria, was as indispensable as the cham- 
pagnes. 

Not that she was altogether herself to-night; she was 
feverish, she was bitter, she was full of stinging ironies ; but 
that delicious gayety, like a kitten’s play, was gone from her, 
and its place, for the first time in her life, was supplied by un- 
real and hectic excitation. In truth, while she laughed, and 
coquetted, and fenced with the bright two-edged blade of her 
wit, and tossed down the wines into her little throat like a 
trooper, she was thinking nothing at all of what was around 
her, and very little of what she said or she did. She was think- 
ing of the starless night out yonder, of the bleak, arid country, 
of the great, dim, measureless plains; of one who was passing 
through them all, and one who might never return. 

It was the first time that the absent had ever troubled her 
present; it was the first time that ever this foolish, senseless, 
haunting, unconquerable fear for another had approached her: 
fear — she had never known it for herself, why should she feel 
it now for him — a man whose lips had touched her own as 
lightly, as indifferently, as they might have touched the leaves 
of a rose or the curls of a dog ! 

She felt her face burn with the flush of a keen, unbearable, 
passionate shame. Men by the score had wooed her love, to be 
flouted with the insouciant mischief of her coquetry, and for- 
gotten to-morrow if they were shot to-day; and now he — he 
whose careless, calm caress would make her heart vibrate and 
her limbs tremble with an emotion she had never known — he 
valued her love so little that he never even knew that he had 
roused it! To the proud young warrior of France a greater 
degradation, a deadlier humiliation, than this could not have 
come. 

Yet she was true as steel to him; true with the strong and 
loyal fealty that is inborn with such natures as hers. To have 
betrayed what he had trusted to her, because she was neglected 
and wounded by him, would have been a feminine baseness of 
which the soldier-like soul of Cigarette would have been totally 
incapable. Her revenge might be fierce, and rapid, and sure, 


S-L’tl-L Atr MONDE. 455 

like the revenge of a soldier; but it could never be stealing 
and traitorous, and never like the revenge of a woman. 

Not a word escaped her that could have given a clew to the 
secret with which he had involuntarily weighted her; she only 
studied with interest and keenness the face and the words of 
this man whom he had loved, and from whom he had fled as 
criminals flee from their accusers. 

“ What is your name ? ” she asked him curtly, in one of the 
pauses of the amorous and witty nonsense that circulated in 
the tent in which the officers of Chasseurs were entertaining 
him. 

“ Well — some call me Seraph.” 

“ Ah ! you have petits noms, then, in Albion ? I should have 
thought she was too somber and too stiff for them. Besides ? ” 

“ Lyonnesse.” 

“ What a droll name ! What are you ? ” 

“ A soldier.” 

“ Good ! What grade ? ” 

“ A Colonel of Guards.” 

Cigarette gave a little w;histle to herself; she remembered 
that a Marshal of France had once said of a certain Chasseur, 
“ He has the seat of the English Guards.” 

“ My pretty catechist, M. le Due does not tell you his title,” 
cried one of the officers. 

Cigarette interrupted him with a toss of her head. 

“ Ouf ! Titles are nothing to me. I am a child of the People. 
So you are a Duke, are you, M. le Seraph? Well, that is not 
much, to my thinking. Bah! there is Fialin made a Duke in 
Paris, and there are aristocrats here wearing privates’ uniforms, 
and littering down their own horses. Bah! Have you that 
sort of thing in Albion ? ” 

“ Attorneys throned on high, and gentlemen glad to sweep 
crossings ? Oh, yes ! ” laughed her interlocutor. “ But you 
speak of aristocrats in your ranks — that reminds me. Have 
you not in this corps a soldier called Louis Victor?.” 

He had turned as he spoke to one of the officers, who an- 
swered him in the affirmative; while Cigarette listened with 
all her curiosity and all her interest, that needed a deeper 
name, heightened and tight-strung. 

“ A fine fellow,” continued the Chef d’Escadron to whom he 
had appealed. “He behaved magnificently the other day at 
Zaraila; he must be distinguished for it. He is just sent on 


456 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


a perilous errand, but though so quiet he is a croc-mitaine, and 
woe to the Arabs who slay him! Are you acquainted with 
him?” 

“ Not in the least. But I wished to hear all I could of him. 
I have been told he seems above his present position. Is it so ? ” 

“ Likely enough, monsieur ; he seems a gentleman. But then 
we have many gentlemen in the ranks, and we can make no 
difference for that. Cigarette can tell you more of him; she 
used to complain that he bowed like a Court chamberlain.” 

“ Oh, he ! — I did ! ” cried Cigarette, stung into instant irony 
because pained and irritated by being appealed to on the sub- 
ject. “ And, of course, when so many of his officers have the 
manners of Pyrenean bears, it is a little awkward for him to 
bring us the manners of a Palace ! ” 

Which effectually chastised the Chef d’Escadron, who was 
one of those who had a ton de garnison of the roughest, and 
piqued himself on his powers of fence much more than on his 
habits of delicacy. 

“Has this Victor any history?” asked the English Duke. 

“ He has written one with his sword ; a fine one,” said Ciga- 
rette curtly. “We are not given here to care much about any 
other.” 

“ Quite right ; I asked because a friend of mine who had seen 
his carvings wished to serve him, if it were possible; and ” 

“ Ho ! That is Miladi, I suppose ? ” Cigarette’s eyes flashed 
fire instantly, in wrath and suspicion. “ What did she tell you 
about him, la belle dedaigneuse? ” 

“ I am ignorant of whom you speak ? ” he answered, with 
something of surprise and annoyance. 

“Are you?” said Cigarette, in derision. “I doubt that. Of 
whom should I speak but of her ? Bah ! She insulted him, she 
offered him gold, she sent my men the spoils of her table, as 
if they were paupers, and he thinks it all divine because it is 
done by Mme. la Princesse Corona d’Amagiie! Faugh! when 
he was delirious, the other night, he could babble of nothing 
but of her — of her — of her ! ” 

The jealous, fiery impatience in her vanquished every other 
thought ; she was a child in much, she was untutored in all ; she 
had no thought that by her scornful vituperation of “ Miladi ” 
she could either harm Cecil or betray herself. But she was 
amazed to see the English guest change color with a haughty 
anger that he strove to subdue as he half rose and answered 


SEUL AU MONDE. 457 

her with an accent in his voice that reminded her — she knew 
not why — of Bel-a-faire-peur and of Marquise. 

“ Mme. la Princesse Corona d’Amagiie is my sister ; why do 
you venture to couple the name of this Chasseur with hers ? ” 
Cigarette sprang to her feet, vivacious, imperious, reckless, 
dared to anything by the mere fact of being publicly ar- 
raigned. 

“ Pardieu ! Is it insult to couple the silver pheasant with 
the Eagles of France? — a pretty idea, truly! So she is your 
sister, is she? Miladi? Well, then, tell her from me to think 
twice before she outrages a soldier with ‘ patronage 9 ; and tell 
her, too, that had I been he I would have ground my ivory toys 
into powder before I would have let them become the play- 
things of a grande dame who tendered me gold for them ! ” 

The Englishman looked at her with astonishment that was 
mingled with a vivid seme of intense annoyance and irritated 
pride, that the name he cherished closest should be thus brought 
in, at a camp dinner, on the lips of a vivandiere and in con- 
nection with a trooper of Chasseurs. 

“ I do not understand your indignation, mademoiselle,” he 
said, with an impatient stroke to his beard. “ There is no oc- 
casion for it. Mme. Corona d’Amagiie, my sister,” he con- 
tinued, to the officers present, “ became accidentally acquainted 
with the skill at sculpture of this Corporal of yours; he ap- 
peared to her a man of much refinement and good breeding. 

She chanced to name him to me, and feeling some pity ” 

“ M. le Due ! ” cried the ringing voice of Cigarette, loud and 
startling as a bugle-note, while she stood like a little lioness, 
flushed with the draughts of champagne and with the warmth 
of wrath at once jealous and generous, “ keep your compassion 
until it is asked of you. Mo soldier of France needs it; that 
I promise you. I know this man that you talk of 4 pitying/ 
Well, I saw him at Zaraila three weeks ago; he had drawn up 
his men to die with them rather than surrender and yield up the 
guidon; I dragged him half dead, when the field was won, from 
under his horse, and his first conscious act was to give the 
drink that I brought him to a wretch who had thieved from 
him. Our life here is hell upon earth to such as he, yet none 
ever heard a lament wrung out of him; he is gone to the chances, 
of death to-night as most men go to their mistresses’ kisses; 
he is a soldier Napoleon would have honored. Such a one is 
not to have the patronage of a Miladi Corona, nor the pity of 


458 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


a stranger of England. Let the first respect him; let the last 
imitate him ! ” 

And Cigarette, having pronounced her defense and her 
eulogy with the vibrating eloquence of some orator from a 
tribune, threw her champagne goblet down with a crash, and, 
breaking through the arms outstretched to detain her, forced 
her way out despite them, and left her hosts alone in their 
lighted tent. 

“ C’est Cigarette ! ” said the Chef d’Escadron, with a shrug 
of his shoulders, as of one who explained, by that sentence, 
a whole world of irreclaimable eccentricities. 

“ A strange little Amazon!” said their guest. “Is she in 
love with this Victor, that I have offended her so much with 
his name ? ” 

The Major shrugged his shoulders. 

“ I don’t know that, monsieur,” answered one. “ She will 
defend a man in his absence, and rate him to his face most 
soundly. Cigarette whirls about like a little paper windmill, 
just as the breeze blows; but, as the windmill never leaves its 
stick, so she is always constant to the Tricolor.” 

Their guest said little more on the subject; in his own 
thoughts he was bitterly resentful that, by the mention of this 
Chasseur’s fortunes, he should have brought in the name he 
loved so well — the purest, fairest, haughtiest name in Europe — 
into a discussion with a vivandiere at a camp dinner. 

Chateauroy, throughout, had said nothing; he had listened 
in silence, the darkness lowering still more heavily upon his 
swarthy features; only now he opened his lips for a few brief 
words : 

“ Mon cher Due, tell Madame not to waste the rare balm of 
her pity. The fellow you inquire for was an outcast and an 
outlaw when he came to us. He fights well — it is often a black- 
guard’s virtue ! ” 

His guest nodded and changed the subject; his impatience 
and aversion at the introduction of his sister’s name into the 
discussion made him drop the theme unpursued, and let it die 
out forgotten. 

Venetia Corona associated with an Algerian trooper! If 
Cigarette had been of his own sex he could have dashed the 
white teeth down her throat for having spoken of the two in one 
breath. 

And as, later on, he stretched his gallant limbs out on his 


SEUL AU MONDE. 


459 


narrow camp paillasse, tired with a long day in saddle under the 
hot African sun, the Seraph fell asleep with his right arm under 
his handsome golden head, and thought no more of this un- 
known French trooper. 

But Cigarette remained wakeful. 

She lay curled up in the straw against her pet horse, Etoile 
Filante, with her head on the beast’s glossy flank and her hand 
among his mane. She often slept thus in camp, and the horse 
would lie still and cramped for hours rather than awaken her, 
or, if he rose, would take the most watchful heed to leave un- 
harmed the slender limbs, the flushed cheeks, the frank, fair 
brow of the sleeper beneath him, that one stroke of his hoof 
could have stamped out into a bruised and shapeless mass. 

To-night fitoile Filante slept, and his mistress was awake — 
wide-awake, with her eyes looking out into the darkness beyond, 
with a passionate mist of unshed tears in them, and her mouth 
quivering with pain and with wrath. The vehement excita- 
tion had not died away in her, but there had come with it a dull, 
spiritless, aching depression. It had roused her to fury to hear 
the reference to her rival spoken — of that aristocrat whose name 
had been on Cecil’s lips when he had been delirious. She had 
kept his secret loyally, she had defended him vehemently ; there 
was something that touched her to the core in the thought of 
the love with which he had recognized this friend who, in igno- 
rance, spoke of him as of some unknown French soldier. She 
could not tell what the history was, but she could divine nearly 
enough to feel its pathos and its pain. She had known, in her 
short life, more of men and of their passions and of their for- 
tunes than many lives of half a century in length can ever do; 
she could guess, nearly enough to be wounded with its sorrow, 
the past which had exiled the man who had kept by him his 
lost mother’s ring as the sole relic of years to which he was dead 
as utterly as though he were lying in his coffin. FTo matter what 
the precise reason was — women, or debt, or accident, or ruin — 
these two, who had been familiar comrades, were now as stran- 
gers to each other ; the one slumbered in ignorance near her, the 
other had gone out to the close peril of death, lest the eyes of his 
friend should recognize his face and read his secret. It troubled 
her, it weighed on her, it smote her with a pang. It might be 
that now, even now — this very moment, while her gaze watched 
the dusky shadows of the night chase one another along the 
dreary plains — a shot might have struck down this life that 


460 


UNDEB TWO FLAGS. 


had been stripped of name and fame and country; even now all 
might be over ! 

And Cigarette felt a cold, sickly shudder seize her that never 
before, at death or danger,, had chilled the warm, swift current 
of her bright French blood. In bitter scorn at herself, she 
muttered hot oaths between her pretty teeth. 

Mere de Dieu! he had touched her lips as carelessly as her 
own kiss would have touched the rose-hued, waxen petals of a 
cluster of oleander-blossoms ; and she cared for him still ! 

While the Seraph slept dreamlessly, with the tents of the 
French camp around him, and the sleepless eyes of Cigarette 
watched afar off the dim, distant forms of the vedettes as they 
circled slowly round at their outpost duty — eight leagues off, 
through a vast desert of shadow and silence, the two horsemen 
swept swiftly on. Not a word had passed between them; they 
rode close together in unbroken stillness; they were scarcely 
visible to each other, for there was no moon, and storm-clouds 
obscured the skies. Now and then their horses’ hoofs struck 
fire from a flint-stone, and the flash sparkled through the dark- 
ness; often not even the sound of their gallop was audible on 
the gray, dry, loose soil. 

Every rood of the road was sown thick with peril. No frown- 
ing ledge of rock, with pine-roots in its clefts, but might serve 
as the barricade behind which some foe lurked; no knot of 
cypress-shrubs, black even on that black sheet of shadow, but 
might be pierced with the steel tubes of leveled, waiting 
muskets. 

Pillaging, burning, devastating wherever they could, in what 
was to them a holy war of resistance to the infidel and the 
invader, the predatory tribes had broken out into a revolt which 
the rout of Zaraila, heavy blow though it had been to them, had 
by no means ended. They were still in arms, infesting the 
country everywhere southward; defying regular pursuit, im- 
pervious to regular attacks; carrying on the harassing guerrilla 
warfare at which they were such adepts, and causing thus to 
their Frankish foe more irritation and more loss than decisive 
engagements would have produced. They feared nothing, had 
nothing to lose, and could subsist almost upon nothing. They 
might be driven into the desert, they might even be extermi- 
nated after long pursuit; but they would never be vanquished. 
And they were scattered now far and wide over the country; 



Photo by Byron 





SEUL AU MONDE. 


461 


every cave might shelter, every ravine might inclose them ; they 
appeared here, they appeared there; they swooped down on a 
convoy, they carried sword and flame into a settlement, they 
darted like a flight of hawks upon a foraging-party, they picked 
off any vedette, as he wheeled his horse round in the moonlight ; 
and every yard of the sixty miles which the two gray chargers 
of the Chasseurs d’Afrique must cover ere their service was 
done was as rife with death as though its course lay over the 
volcanic line of an earthquake or a hollow mined and sprung. 

They had reached the center of the plain when the sound 
they had long looked for rang on their ears, piercing the heavy, 
breathless stillness of the night. It was the Allah-il-Allah of 
their foes, the war-cry of the Moslem. Out of the gloom — 
whether from long pursuit or some near hiding-place they could 
not tell — there broke suddenly upon them the fury of an Arab 
onslaught. In the darkness all they could see were the flash 
of steel, the flame of fierce eyes against their own, the white 
steam of smoking horses, the spray of froth flung off the snort- 
ing nostrils, the rapid glitter of the curved flissas — whether two, 
or twenty, or twice a hundred were upon them they could not 
know — they never did know. All of which they were conscious 
was that in an instant, from the tranquil melancholy around 
them of the great, dim, naked space, they were plunged into the 
din, the fury, the heat, the close, crushing, horrible entangle- 
ment of conflict, without the power to perceive or to number 
their foes, and only able to follow the sheer, simple instincts of 
attack and of defense. All they were sensible of was one of 
those confused moments, deafening, blinding, filled with vio- 
lence and rage and din — an eternity in semblance, a second in 
duration — that can never be traced, never be recalled; yet in 
whose feverish excitement men do that which, in their calmer 
hours, would look to them a fable of some Amadis of Gaul. 

How they were attacked, how they resisted, how they struck, 
how they were encompassed, how they thrust back those who 
were hurled on them in the black night, with the north sea- 
wind like ice upon their faces, and the loose African soil drift- 
ing up in clouds of sand around them, they could never have 
told. Nor how they strained free from the armed ring that cir- 
cled them, and beat aside the shafts of lances and the blades of 
swords, and forced their chargers breast to breast against the 
fence of steel, and through the tempest of rage, and blows, and 
shouts, and wind, and driven sand, cut their way through the 


462 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


foe whose very face they scarce could see, and plunged away 
into the shadows across the desolation of the plain, pursued, 
whether by one or by a thousand they could not guess; for the 
gallop was noiseless on the powdered soil, and the Arab yell of 
baffled passion and slaughterous lust was half drowned in the 
rising of the wind-storm. Had it been day, they would have 
seen their passage across the level table-land traced by a crim- 
son stream upon the sand, in which the blood of Frank and 
Arab blended equally. 

As it was, they dashed headlong down through the darkness 
that grew yet denser and blacker as the storm rose. For miles 
the ground was level before them, and they had only to let the 
half -maddened horses, that had as by a miracle escaped all in- 
jury, rush on at their own will through the whirl of the wind 
that drove the dust upward in spiral columns and brought icy 
breaths of the north over the sear, sunburned, southern wastes. 

For a long space they had no sense but that of rapid, cease- 
less motion through the thick gloom and against the pressure of 
the violent blasts. The speed of their gallop and the strength 
of the currents of air were like some narcotic that drowned and 
that dizzied perception. In the intense darkness neither could 
see, neither hear, the other ; the instinct of the beasts kept them 
together, but no word could be heard above the roar of the 
storm, and no light broke the somber veil of shadow through 
which they passed as fast as leopards course through the night. 
The first faint streak of dawn grew gray in the east when Cecil 
felt his charger stagger and sway beneath him, and halt, worn 
out and quivering in every sinew with fatigue. He threw him- 
self off the animal in time to save himself from falling with it 
as it reeled and sank to the ground. 

“ Massena cannot stir another yard,” he said. “ Do you think 
they follow us still ? ” 

There was no reply. 

He strained his sight to pierce the darkness, but he could 
distinguish nothing; the gloom was still too deep. He spoke 
more loudly; still there was no reply. Then he raised his voice 
in a shout; it rang through the silence, and, when it ceased, 
the silence reigned again. 

A deadly chill came on him. How had he missed his com- 
rade? They must be far apart, he knew, since no response was 
given to his summons ; or — the alternative rose before him with 
a terrible foreboding. 


SEITL AU MONDE. 


463 


That intense quiet had a repose as of death in it, a ghastly 
loneliness that seemed filled with desolation. His horse was 
stretched before him on the sand, powerless to rise and drag 
itself a rood onward, and fast expiring. From the plains around 
him not a sound came, either of friend or foe. The conscious- 
ness that he was alone, that he had lost forever the only friend 
left to him, struck on him with that conviction which so often 
foreruns the assurance of calamity. Without a moment’s pause 
he plunged back in the direction he had come, leaving the 
charger on the ground to pant its life out as it must, and sought 
to feel his way along, so as to seek as best he could the com- 
panion he had deserted. He still could not see a rood before 
him, but he went on slowly, with some vague hope that he should 
erelong reach the man whom he knew death or the fatality of 
accident alone would keep from his side. He could not feel or 
hear anything that gave him the slightest sign or clew to aid 
his search ; he only wandered farther from his horse, and risked 
falling afresh into the hands of his pursuers; he shouted again 
with all his strength, but his own voice alone echoed over the 
plains, while his heart stood still with the same frozen dread 
♦ that a man feels when, wrecked on some barren shore, his cry 
for rescue rings back on his own ear over the waste of waters. 

The flicker of the dawn was growing lighter in the sky, and 
he could see dimly now, as in some winter day’s dark twilight, 
though all around him hung the leaden mist, with the wild 
winds driving furiously. It was with difficulty also that he 
kept his feet against their force; but he was blown onward by 
their current, though beaten from side to side, and he still 
made his way forward. He had repassed the ground already 
traversed by some hundred yards or more, which seemed the 
length of many miles in the hurricane that was driving over 
the earth and sky, when some outline still duskier than the 
dusky shadow caught his sight; it was the body of a horse, 
standing on guard over the fallen body of a man. 

Another moment and he was beside them. 

“ My God ! Are you hurt ? ” 

He could see nothing but an indistinct and shapeless mass, 
without form or color to mark it out from the brooding gloom 
and from the leaden earth. But the voice he knew so well 
answered him with the old love and fealty in it; eager with 
fear for him. 

“ When did you miss me, sir ? I didn’t mean you to know ; 


464 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


I held on as long as I could; and when I couldn’t no longer, 

I thought you was safe not to see I’d knocked over, so dark as it 
was.” 

“Great Heavens! You are hurt, then?” 

“Just finished, sir. Lord! it don’t matter. Only you ride 
on, Mr. Cecil; ride on, I say. Don’t mind me.” 

“ What is it ? When were you struck ? O Heaven ! I never 
dreamt ” 

Cecil hung over him, striving in vain through the shadows 
to read the truth from the face on which he felt by instinct the 
seal of death was set. 

“ I never meant you should know, sir. I meant just to drop 
behind and die on the quiet. You see, sir, it was just this way; 
they hit me as we forced through them. There’s the lance- 
head in my loins now. I pressed it in hard, and kept the blood 
from flowing, and thought I should hold out so till the sun 
rose. But I couldn’t do it so long; I got sick and faint after 
a while, and I knew well enough it was death. So I dropped 
down while I’d sense left to check the horse and get out of 
saddle in silence. I hoped you wouldn’t miss me, in the dark- 
ness and the noise the wind was making; and you didn’t hear* 
me then, sir. I was glad.” 

His voice was checked in a quick, gasping breath; his only 
thought had been to lie down and die in solitude so that his- 
master might be saved. 

A great sob shook Cecil as he heard; no false hope came to- 
him; he felt that this man was lost to him forever, that this- 
was the sole recompense which the cruelty of Africa would 
give to a fidelity passing the fidelity of woman; these throes 
of dissolution the only payment with which fate would ever 
requite a loyalty that had held no travail weary, no exile pain, 
and no danger worthy counting, so long as they were encoun- 
tered and endured in his own service. 

“ Don’t take on about it, sir,” whispered Rake, striving to 
raise his head that he might strain his eyes better through the 
gloom to see his master’s face. “It was sure to come some 
time; and I aint in no pain— to speak of. Do leave me, Mr. 
Cecil — leave me, for God’s sake, and save yourself ! ” 

“ Did you leave me ? ” 

The answer was very low, and his voice shook as he uttered 
it; but through the roar of the hurricane Rake heard it. 

“ That was different, sir,” he said simply. “ Let me lie here. 


SEUL AU MONDE. 465 

and go you on. It ’ll soon be over, and there’s naught to be 
done.” 

“ O God ! is no help possible ? ” 

“ Don’t take on, sir ; it’s no odds. I allays was a scamp, and 
scamps die game, you know. My life’s been a rare spree, count 
it all and all; and it’s a great, good thing, you see, sir, to go 
off quick like this. I might have been laid in hospital. If you’d 
only take the beast and ride on, sir ” 

“Hush! hush! Would you make me coward, or brute, or 
both?” 

The words broke in an agony from him. The time had been 
when he had been himself stretched in what he had thought 
was death, in just such silence, in just such solitude, upon the 
bare, baked earth, far from men’s aid, and near only to the 
hungry eyes of watching beasts of prey. Then he had been 
very calm, and waited with indifference for the end; now his 
eyes swept over the remorseless wastes, that were growing 
faintly visible under the coming dawn, with all the impatience, 
the terror, of despair. Death had smitten down many beside 
him ; buoyant youth and dauntless manhood he had seen a thou- 
sand times swept under the great waves of war and lost forever ; 
but it had an anguish for him here that he would never have 
known had he felt his own life-blood well out over the sand. 
The whole existence of this man had been sacrificed for him, 
and its only reward was a thrust of a lance in a midnight fray 
— a grave in an alien soil. 

His grief fell dully on ears half deafened already to the 
sounds of the living world. The exhaustion that follows on 
great loss of blood was upon the soldier who for the last half 
hour had lain there in the darkness and the stillness, quietly 
waiting death, and not once seeking even to raise his voice for 
succor lest the cry should reach and should imperil his master. 

The morning had broken now T , but the storm had not lulled. 
The nothern winds were sweeping over the plains in tenfold 
violence, and the rains burst and poured, with the fury of 
water-spouts on the crust of the parched, cracked earth. 
Around them there was nothing heard or seen except the leaden, 
angry mists, tossed to and fro under the hurricane, and the 
white light of the coming day breaking lividly through the 
clouds. The world held no place of more utter desolation, more 
unspeakable loneliness; and in its misery Cecil, flung down 
upon the sands beside him, could do nothing except — helpless 


466 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


to aid, and powerless to save — watch the last breath grow feebler 
and feebler, until it faded out from the only life that had been 
faithful to him. 

By the fitful gleams of day he could see the blood slowly 
ebbing out from the great gap where the lance-head was still 
bedded with its wooden shaft snapped in two; he could see the 
drooped head that he had raised upon his knee, with the yellow, 
northern curls that no desert suns had darkened; and Rake’s 
eyes, smiling so brightly and so bravely still, looked up from 
under their weary lids to his. 

“I’d never let you take my hand before, sir; just take it 
once now — will you? — while I can see you still.” 

Their hands met as he asked it, and held each other close and 
long; all the loyal service of the one life, and all the speechless 
gratitude of the other, told better than by all words in that 
one farewell. 

A light that was not from the stormy, dusky morning shone 
over the soldier’s face. 

“ Time was, sir,” he said, with a smile, “ when I used to think 
as how, some day or another, when I should have done some- 
thing great and grand, and you was back among your own 
again, and they here had given me the Cross, I’d have asked you 
to have done that before all the Army, and just to have said to 
’em, if so you’d liked, ‘ He was a scamp, and he wasn’t thought 
good for naught; but he kep’ true to me, and you see it made 
him go straight, and I aren’t ashamed to call him my friend.’ 
I used to think that, sir, though ’twas silly, perhaps. But it’s 
best as it is — a deal best, no doubt. If you was only back safe 
in camp ” 

“ O God ! cease ! I am not worthy one thought of love like 
yours.” 

“ Yes, you are, sir — leastways, you was to me. When you 
took pity on me, it was just a toss-up if I didn’t go right to 
the gallows. Don’t grieve that way, Mr. Cecil. If I could just 
have seen you home again in your place, I should have been 
glad — that’s all. You’ll go back one day, sir; when you do, tell 
the King I aint never forgot him.” 

His voice grew faint as the last sentence stole from his lips; 
he lay quite still, his head leaned back against his master; and 
the day came, with the north winds driving over the plains, 
and the gray mists tossed by them to and fro like smoke. 

There was a long silence, a pause in which the windstorm 


SEUL AU MONDE. 


467 


ceased, and the clouds of the loosed sands sunk. Alone, with 
the wastes stretching around them, were the living and the dy- 
ing man, with the horse standing motionless beside them, and, 
above, the gloom of the sullen sky. No aid was possible; they 
could but wait, in the stupefaction of despair, for the end of all 
to come. 

In that awful stillness, in that sudden lull in the madness of 
the hurricane, death had a horror which it never wore in* the 
riot of the battlefield, in the intoxication of the slaughter. 
There was no pity in earth or heaven; the hard, hot ground 
sucked down its fill of blood; the icy air enwrapped them like 
a shroud. 

The faithfulness of love, the strength of gratitude,- were of no 
avail; the one perished in agony, the other was powerless to 
save. 

In that momentary hush, as the winds sank low, the heavy 
eyes, half sightless now, sought with their old wistful, doglike 
loyalty the face to which so soon they would be blind forever. 

“ Would you tell me once, sir — now? I never asked — I never 
would have done — but may be I might know in this last minute. 
You never sinned that sin you bear the charge on? ” 

“ God is my witness, no.” 

The light, that was like sunlight, shone once more in the ach- 
ing, wandering eyes. 

“ I knew, I knew ! It was ” 

Cecil bowed his head over him, lower and lower. 

“ Hush ! He was but a child ; and I ” 

With a sudden and swift motion, as though new life were 
thrilling in him, Hake raised himself erect, his arms stretched 
outward to the east, where the young day was breaking. 

“ I knew, I knew ! I never doubted. You will go back to your 
own some day, and men shall learn the truth — thank God! 
thank God ! 99 

Then, with that light still on his face, his head fell backward ; 
and with one quick, brief sigh his life fled out forever. 

The time passed on ; the storm had risen afresh ; the violence 
of the gusts blew yellow sheets of sand whirling over the plains. 
Alone, with the dead across his knees, Cecil sat motionless as 
though turned to stone. His eyes were dry and fixed ; but ever 
and again a great, tearless sob shook him from head to foot. 
The only life that linked him with the past, the only love that 


468 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


had suffered all things for his sake, were gone, crushed out 
as though they never had been, like some insect trodden in the 
soil. 

He had lost all consciousness, all memory, save of that life- 
less thing which lay across his knees, like a felled tree, like a 
broken log, with the glimmer of the tempestuous day so chill 
and white upon the upturned face. 

He was alone on earth; and the solitudes around him were 
not more desolate than his own fate. 

He was like a man numbed and stupefied by intense cold ; his 
veins seemed stagnant, and his sight could only see those fea- 
tures that became so terribly serene, so fearfully unmoved with 
the dread calm of death. Yet the old mechanical instincts of 
a soldier guided him still ; he vaguely knew that his errand had 
to be done, must be done, let his heart ache as it would, let him 
long as he might to lie down by the side of his only friend, and 
leave the torture of life to grow still in him also for evermore. 

Instinctively, he moved to carry out the duty trusted to him. 
He looked east and west, north and south; there was nothing 
in sight that could bring him aid; there were only the dust- 
clouds hurled in billows hither and thither by the bitter winds 
still blowing from the sea. All that could be done had to be 
done by himself alone. His own safety hung on the swiftness 
of his flight: for aught he knew, at every moment, out of the 
mist and the driven sheets of sand there might rush the desert- 
horses of his foes. But this memory was not with him; all he 
thought of was that burden stretched across his limbs, which, 
laid down one hour here unwatched, would be the prey of the 
jackal and the vulture. He raised it reverently in his arms, and 
with long, laborious effort drew its weight up across the saddle 
of the charger which stood patiently waiting by, turning its 
docile eyes with a plaintive, wondering sadness on the body of 
the rider it had loved. Then he mounted himself; and with 
the head of his lost comrade borne up upon his arm, and rested 
gently on his breast, he rode westward over the great plain to 
where his mission lay. 

The horse paced slowly beneath the double load of dead and 
living; he would not urge the creature faster on; every move- 
ment that shook the drooping limbs, or jarred the repose of that 
last sleep, seemed desecration. He passed the place where his 
own horse was stretched: the vultures were already there. He 
shuddered; and then pressed faster on, as though the beasts 


SET7L AU MONDE. 


469 


and birds of prey would rob him of his burden ere he could 
give it sanctuary. And so he rode, mile after mile, over the 
barren land, with no companion save the dead. 

The winds blew fiercely in his teeth ; the sand was in his eyes 
and hair; the way was long, and weary, and sown thick with- 
danger; but he knew of nothing, felt and saw nothing save 
that one familiar face so strangely changed and transfigured by 
that glory with which death had touched it. 


CHAPTER XXXI. 


“JE YOUS ACHETE VOTRE VIE.” 

Thus burdened, he made his way for over two leagues. The 
hurricane never abated, and the blinding dust rose around him 
in great waves. The horse fell lame; he had to dismount, and 
move slowly and painfully over the loose, heavy soil on foot, 
raising the drooping head of the lifeless rider. It was bitter, 
weary, cruel travail, of an intolerable labor, of an intolerable 
pain. 

Once or twice he grew sick and giddy, and lost for a moment 
all consciousness; but he pressed onward, resolute not to yield 
and leave the vultures, hovering aloft, their prey. He was still 
somewhat weakened by the wounds of Zaraila; he had been 
bruised and exhausted by the skirmish of the past night ; he was 
weary and heart-broken; but he did not yield to his longing to 
sink down on the sands, and let his life ebb out; he held pa- 
tiently onward through the infinite misery of the passage. At 
last he drew near the caravanserai where he had been directed 
to obtain a change of horses. It stood midway in the distance 
that he had to traverse, and almost alone when the face of the 
country changed, and was more full of color, and more broken 
into rocky and irregular surface. 

As a man walks in a dream, he led the sinking beast toward 
it8 shelter, as its irregular corner towers became dimly per- 
ceptible to him through the dizzy mists that had obscured his 
sight. By sheer instinct he found his route straight toward 
the open arch of its entrance-way, and into the square court- 
yard thronged with mules and camels and horses; for the 
caravanserai stood on the only road that led through that dis- 
trict to the south, and was the only house of call for drovers, 
or shelter for travelers and artists of Europe who might pass 
that way. The groups in the court paused in their converse and 
in their occupations, and looked in awe at the gray charger 
with its strange burden, and the French Chasseur who came so 
blindly forward like a man feeling his passage through the 
dark. There was something in the sight that had a vague terror 

470 


“JE VOUS ACHETE VOTRE VIE.” 


471 


for them before they clearly saw what this thing was which was 
thus brought into their presence. Cecil moved slowly on into 
their midst, his hand on the horse’s rein; then a great dark- 
ness covered his sight; he swayed to and fro, and fell senseless 
on the gray stone of the paved court, while the muleteers and 
the camel-drivers, the Kabyls and the French, who were min- 
gled there, crowded around him in fear and in wonder. When 
consciousness returned to him he was lying on a stone bench 
in the shadow of the wall, with the coolness of the fountain 
water bubbling near, and a throng of lean, bronzed, eager faces 
about him in the midday sunlight which had broken through 
the windstorm. 

Instantly he remembered all. 

“ Where is he ? ” he asked. 

They knew that he meant the dead man, and answered him 
in a hushed murmur of many voices. They had placed the body 
gently down within, in a darkened chamber. 

A shiver passed over him; he stretched his hand out for * 
water that they held to him. 

“ Saddle me a fresh horse; I have my work to do.” 

He knew that for no friendship, or grief, or suffering, or self- 
pity might a soldier pause by the wayside while his errand was 
still undone, his duty unfulfilled. 

He drank the water thirstily ; then, reeling slightly still, from 
the weakness that was still upon him, he rose, rejecting their 
offers of aid. “ Take me to him,” he said simply. They under- 
stood him; there were French soldiers among them, and they 
took him, without question or comment, across the court to the 
little square stone cell within one of the towers, where they had 
laid the corpse, with nothing to break the quiet and the solitude 
except the low, soft cooing of some doves that had their homes 
in its dark corners, and flew in and out at pleasure through the 
oval aperture that served as window. 

He motioned them all back with his hand, and went into the 
gloom of the chamber alone. Not one among them followed. 

When he came forth again the reckless and riotous fantassins 
of France turned silently and reverentially away, so that they 
should not look upon his face. For it was well known through- 
out the army that no common tie had bound together the exiles 
of England, and the fealty of comrade to comrade was sacred 
in their sight. 

The fresh animal, saddled, was held ready outside the gates. 


472 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


He crossed the court, moving still like a man without sense of 
what he did ; he had the instinct to carry out the mission trusted 
to him,, instantly and accurately, but he had no distinct per- 
ception or memory of aught else, save of those long-familiar 
features of which, ere he could return, the cruel sun of Africa 
would not have spared one trace. 

He passed under the shadow of the gateway arch — a shadow 
black and intense against the golden light which, with the ceas- f 
ing of the storm, flooded the land in the full morning. There 
were movement, noise, change, haste in the entrance. Besides 
the arrival of the detachment of the line and a string of north- 
ward-bound camels, the retinue of some travelers of rank was 
preparing for departure, and the resources of the humble cara- 
vanserai were taxed beyond their powers. The name that some 
of the hurrying grooms shouted loudly in their impatience broke 
through his stupor and reached him. It was that of the woman 
whom, however madly, he loved with all the strength of a pas- 
sion born out of utter hopelessness. He turned to the outrider 
nearest him : 

“You are of the Princess Coronal suite? What does she 
do here ? ” 

“ Madame travels to see the country and the war.” 

“ The war ? This is no place for her. The land is alive with 
danger — rife with death.” 

“ Miladi travels with M. le Due, her brother. Mildadi does 
not know what fear is.” 

“ But ” 

The remonstrance died on his lips; he stood gazing out from 
the gloom of the arch at a face close to him, on which the sun 
shone full, a face unseen for twelve long years, and which, a 
moment before laughing and careless in the light, changed, 
and grew set, and rigid, and pale with the pallor of an unut- 
terable horror. His own flushed, and moved, and altered with 
a wholly different emotion — emotion that was, above all, of an 
intense and yearning tenderness. For a moment both stood 
motionless and speechless; then, with a marvelous self-com- 
mand and self-restraint, Cecil brought his hand to his brow in 
military salute, passed w T ith the impassiveness of a soldier who 
passed a gentleman, reached his charger, and rode away upon 
his errand over the brown and level ground. 

He had known his brother in that fleeting glance, but he 
hoped that his brother would see no more in him than a French 


473 


“jE YOUS ACHETE YOTRE YIE.” 

trooper who bore resemblance by a strange hazard to one long 
believed to be dead and gone. The instinct of generosity, the 
instinct of self-sacrifice, moved him now as, long ago one fatal 
night, they had moved him to bear the sin of his mother’s dar- 
ling as his own. 

Full remembrance, full consideration of what he had done, 
never came to him as he dashed on across the many leagues 
that still lay between him and his goal. His one impulse had 
been to spare the other from the knowledge that he lived; his 
one longing was to have the hardness and the bitterness of his 
own life buried in the oblivion of a soldier’s grave. 

Within six-and-thirty hours the instructions he bore were in 
the tent of the Chef du Bataillon whom they were to direct, 
and he himself returned to the caravanserai to fulfill with his 
own hand to the dead those last offices which he would delegate 
to none. It was night when he arrived; all was still and de- 
serted. He inquired if the party of tourists was gone; they 
answered him in the affirmative; there only remained the de- 
tachment of the French infantry, which were billeted there for 
a while. 

It was in the coolness and the hush of the night, with the 
great stars shining clearly over the darkness of the plains, that 
they made the single grave, under a leaning shelf of rock, with 
the somber fans of a pine spread above it, and nothing near but 
the sleeping herds of goats. The sullen echo of the soldiers’ 
muskets gave its only funeral requiem; and the young lambs 
and kids in many a future spring-time would come and play, 
and browse, and stretch their little, tired limbs upon its sod, 
its sole watchers in the desolation of the plains. 

When all was over, and the startled flocks had settled once 
again to rest and slumber, Cecil still remained there alone. 
Thrown down upon the grave, he never moved as hour after 
hour went by. To others that lonely and unnoticed tomb would 
be as nothing; only one among the thousand marks left on the 
bosom of the violated earth by the ravenous and savage lusts 
of war. But to him it held all that had bound him to his lost 
youth, his lost country, his lost peace; all that had remained of 
the years that were gone, and were now as a dream of the night. 
This man had followed him, cleaved to him, endured misery and 
rejected honor for his sake ; and all the recompense such a life 
received was to be stilled forever by a spear-thrust of an un- 


474 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


known foe, unthanked, undistinguished, unavenged ! It seemed 
to him like murder — murder with which his own hand was 
stained. 

The slow night hours passed; in the stillness that had suc- 
ceeded to the storm of the past day there was not a sound ex- 
cept the bleating of the young goats straying from the herd. 
He lay prostrate under the black boughs of the pine; the ex- 
haustion of great fatigue was on him ; a grief, acute as remorse, 
consumed him for the man who, following his fate, had only 
found at the end a nameless and lonely grave in the land of his 
exile. 

He started with a thrill of almost superstitious fear as 
through the silence he heard a name whispered — the name of his 
childhood, of his past. • 

He sprang to his feet, and as he turned in the moonlight he 
saw once more his brother’s face, pale as the face of the dead, 
and strained with an agonizing dread. Concealment was no 
longer possible. The younger man knew that the elder lived; 
knew it by a strange and irresistible certainty that needed 
no proof, that left no place for hope or fear in its chill, leaden, 
merciless conviction. 

For some moments neither spoke. A flood of innumerable 
memories choked thought or word in both. They knew each 
other — all was said in that. 

Cecil was the first to break the silence. He moved nearer 
with a rapid movement, and his hand fell heavily on the other’s 
shoulder. 

“ Have you lived stainlessly since?” 

The question was stern as the demand of a judge. His 
brother shuddered beneath this touch, and covered his face with 
his hands. 

“ God is my witness, yes ! But you — you — they said that you 
were dead ! ” 

Cecil’s hand fell from his shoulder. There was that in the 
words which smote him more cruelly than any Arab steel could 
have done; there was the accent of regret. 

“ I am dead,” he said simply ; “ dead to the world and you.” 

He who bore the title of Royallieu covered his face. 

“ How have you lived ? ” he whispered hoarsely. 

“ Honorably. Let that suffice. And you ? ” 

The other looked up at him with a piteous appeal — the old, 
timorous, terrified appeal that had been so often seen on the 


i 


“JE YOUS ACHATE VOTREVIE.” 475 

boy’s face, strangely returning on the gracious and mature 
beauty of the man. 

“ In honor too, I swear ! That was my first disgrace, and 
my last. You bore the weight of my shame? Good God, what 
can I say? Such nobility, such sacrifice ” 

He would have said enough, more than enough, to satisfy 
the one who had lost all for his sake, had there but been once 
in his voice no fear, but only love. As it was, that which he 
still thought of was himself alone. While crushed with the 
weight of his brother’s surpassing generosity, he still was 
filled with only one thought that burned through the darkness 
of his bewildered horror, and that thought was his own jeop- 
ardy. Even in the very first hours of his knowledge that the 
man whom he had believed dead was living — living and bear- 
ing the burden of the guilt he should have borne — what he was 
filled with was the imminence of his own peril. 

Cecil stood in silence, looking at him. He saw the boyish 
loveliness he remembered so well altered into the stronger and 
fuller beauty of the man. He saw that life had gone softly, 
smoothly, joyously, with this weak and feminine nature; and 
that, in the absence of temptation to evil, its career had been 
fair and straight in the sight of the world. He saw that his 
brother had been, in one word, happy. He saw that happiness 
had done for this character what adversity had done for his 
own. He saw that by it had been saved a temperament that 
calamity would have wrecked. He stood and looked at him, 
but he spoke not one word; whatever he felt, he restrained 
from all expression. 

The younger man still hid his face upon his hands, as if, even 
in those pale, gray moonbeams, he shunned the light that was 
about him. 

“We believed you were dead,” he murmured wildly. “ They 
said so; there seemed every proof. But when I saw you yes- 
terday, I knew you — I knew you, though you passed me as a 
stranger. T stayed on here; they told me you would return. 
God ! what agony this day and night have been ! ” 

Cecil was silent still; he knew that this agony had been the 
dread lest he should be living. 

There were many emotions at war in him — scorn, and pity, 
and wounded love, and pride too proud to sue for a gratitude 
denied, or quote a sacrifice that was almost without parallel 
in generosity, all held him speechless. To overwhelm the sinner 


476 


•UNDEK TWO FLAGS. 


before him with reproaches, to count and claim the immeasura- 
ble debts due to him, to upbraid and to revile the wretched 
weakness that had left the soil of a guilt not his own to rest 
upon him — to do aught of this was not in him. Long ago 
he had accepted the weight of an alien crime, and borne it 
as his own ; to undo now all that he had done in the 
past, to fling out to ruin now the one whom he had saved 
at such a cost; to turn, after twelve years, and forsake 
the man, all coward though he was, whom he had shielded 
for so long — this was not possible to him. Though it would be 
but his own birthright that hfe would demand, his own justifica- 
tion that he would establish, it would have seemed to him like 
a treacherous and craven thing. No matter that the one for 
whom the sacrifice had been made was unworthy of it, he held 
that every law of honor and justice forbade him now to abandon 
his brother and yield him up to the retribution of his early 
fault. It might have been a folly in the first instance; it might 
even have been a madness, that choice of standing in his 
brother’s place to receive the shame of his brother’s action ; but it 
had been done so long before — done on the spur of generous 
affection, and actuated by the strange hazard that made the 
keeping of a woman’s secret demand the same reticence which 
also saved the young lad’s name; to draw back from it now 
would have been a cowardice impossible to his nature. 

All seemed uttered, without words, by their gaze at one an- 
other. He could not speak with tenderness to this craven who 
had been false to the fair repute of their name — and he would 
not speak with harshness. He felt too sick at heart, too weary, 
too filled with pain, to ask aught of his brother’s life. It had 
been saved from temptation, and therefore saved from evil ; that 
knowledge sufficed to him. 

The younger man stood half stupefied, half maddened. In 
the many years that had passed by, although his character had 
not changed, his position had altered greatly; and in the last 
few months he had enjoyed all the power that wealth and in- 
dependence and the accession to his title could bestow. He felt 
some dull, hot, angered sense of wrong done to him by the fact 
that the rightful heir of them still lived ; some chafing, ingrate, 
and unreasoning impatience with the savior of his whole exist- 
ence; some bitter pangs of conscience that he would be baser 
yet, base beyond all baseness, to remain in his elder’s place, and 
accept this sacrifice still, while knowing now the truth. 


JE VOUS ACHETE VOTEE VIE.” 


477 


“ Bertie — Bertie ! ” he stammered, in hurried appeal — and the 
name of his youth touched the hearer of it strangely, making 
him for the moment forget all save that he looked once more 
upon one of his own race — “ on my soul, I never doubted that 
the story of your death was true. No one did. All the world 
believed it. If I had known you lived, I would have said that 
you were innocent; I would — I would have told them how I 
forged your friend’s name and your own when I was so des- 
perate that I scarce knew what I did. But they said that you 
were killed, and I thought then — then— it was not worth while ; 
it would have broken my father’s heart. God help me! I was 
a coward ! ” 

He spoke the truth; he was a coward; he had ever been one. 
Herein lay the whole story of his fall, his weakness, his sin, 
and his ingratitude. Cecil knew that never will gratitude exist 
where craven selfishness holds reign; yet there was an infinite 
pity mingled with the scorn that moved him. After the years 
of bitter endurance he had passed, the heroic endurance he had 
witnessed, the hard and unending miseries that he had learned 
to take as his daily portion, this feebleness and fear roused 
his wondering compassion almost as a woman’s weakness would 
have done. Still he never answered. The hatred of the stain 
that had been brought upon their name by his brother’s deed 
(stain none the less dark, in his sight, because hidden from the 
world), his revulsion from this man, who was the only creature 
of their race who ever had turned poltroon, the thousand re- 
membrances of childhood that uprose before him, the irresisti- 
ble yearning for some word from the other’s lips that should 
tell of some lingering trace in him of the old love strong enough 
to kill, for the moment at least, the selfish horror of personal 
peril — all these kept him silent. 

His brother misinterpreted that silence. 

“ I am in your power — utterly in your power,” he moaned 
in his fear. “I stand in your place ; I bear your title ; you 
know that our father and our brother are dead? All that I 
have inherited is yours. Do you know that, since you have 
never claimed it ? ” 

“ I know it.” 

“ And you have never come forward to take your rights ? ” 

“ What I did not do to clear my owm honor, I was not likely 
to do merely to hold a title.” 

The meaning of his answer drifted beyond the ear on which 


478 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


his words fell; it was too high to be comprehended by the lower 
nature. The man who lived in prosperity and peace, and in 
the smile of the world, and the purple of power, looked be- 
wildered at the man who led the simple, necessitous, perilous, 
semi-barbaric existence of an Arab-Franco soldier. 

“ But — great Heaven ! — this life of yours ? It must be 
wretchedness ? ” 

“ Perhaps. It has at least no disgrace in it.” 

The reply had the only sternness of contempt that he had 
suffered himself to show. It stung down to his listener’s soul. 

“Ho — no!” he murmured. “You are happier than I. You 
have no remorse to bear! And yet — to tell the world that I 
am guilty ” 

“ You need never tell it ; I shall not.” 

He spoke quite quietly, quite patiently. Yet he well knew, 
and had well weighed, all he surrendered in that promise — the 
promise to condemn himself to a barren and hopeless fate 
forever. 

“ You will not?” 

The question died almost inaudible on his dry, parched 
tongue. The one passion of fear upon him was for himself; 
even in that moment of supplication his disordered thoughts 
hovered wildly over the chances of whether, if his elder brother 
even now asserted his innocence and claimed his birthright, the 
world and its judges would ever believe him. 

Cecil for a while again was silent, standing there by the newly 
made grave of the soldier who had been faithful as those of 
his own race and of his own Order never had been. His heart 
was full. The ingratitude and the self-absorption of this life 
for which his own had been destroyed smote him with a fearful 
suffering. And only a few hours before he had looked once 
more on the face of the beloved friend of his youth; a deadlier 
sacrifice than to lay down wealth, and name, and heritage, and 
the world’s love, was to live on, leaving that one comrade of his 
early days to believe him dead after a deed of shame. 

His brother sank down on the mound of freshly flung earth, 
sinking his head upon his arms with a low moan. Time had 
not changed him greatly; it had merely made him more in- 
tensely desirous of the pleasures and the powers of life, more 
intensely abhorrent of pain, of censure, of the contempt of the 
world. As, to escape these in his boyhood, he had stooped to 
any degradation, so, to escape them in his manhood, he was 


\ 


JE YOUS ACHETE VOTKE VIE.*’ 


479 


capable of descending to any falsehood or any weakness. His 
was one of those natures which, having no love of evil for evil’s 
sake, still embrace any form of evil which may save them from 
the penalty of their own weakness. How, thus meeting one 
w r ho for twelve years he had believed must rise from the tomb 
itself to reproach or to accuse him, unstrung his every nerve, 
and left him with only one consciousness — the desire, at all 
costs, to be saved. 

Cecil’s eyes rested on him with a strange, melancholy pity. 
He had loved his brother as a youth — loved him well enough to 
take and bear a heavy burden of disgrace in his stead. The old 
love was not dead; but stronger than itself was his hatred of 
the shame that had touched their race by the wretched crime 
that had driven him into exile, and his wondering scorn for 
the feeble and self -engrossed character that had lived content- 
edly under false colors, and with a hidden blot screened by a 
fictitious semblance of honor. He could not linger with him; 
he did not know how to support the intolerable pain that op- 
pressed him in the presence of the only living creature of his 
race; he could not answer for himself what passionate and 
withering words might not escape him; every instant of their 
interview was a horrible temptation to him — the temptation 
to demand from this coward his own justification before the 
world — the temptation to seize out of these unworthy hands 
his birthright and his due. 

But the temptation — sweet, insidious, intense, strengthened 
by the strength of right, and well-nigh overwhelming with all 
its fair, delicious promise for the future — did not conquer him. 
What resisted it was his own simple instinct of justice; an 
instinct too straight and true either to yield to self-pity or to 
passionate desire — justice which made him feel that, since he 
had chosen to save this weakling once for their lost mother’s 
sake, he was bound forever not to repent .nor to retract. He 
gazed a while longer, silently, at the younger man, who sat still, 
rocking himself wearily to and fro on the loose earth of the 
freshly filled grave. Then he went and laid his hand on his 
brother’s shoulder. The other started and trembled ; he remem- 
bered that touch in days of old. 

“ Do not fear me,” he said, gently and very gravely. “I 
have kept your secret twelve years; I will keep it still. Be 
happy — be as happy as you can. All I bid of you in return is 
so to live that in your future your past shall be redeemed.” 


480 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


The words of the saint to the thief, “ Je vous achete votre 
vie,” were not more merciful, not more noble, than the words 
with which he purchased, at the sacrifice of his own life, the 
redemption of his brother’s. The other looked at him with a 
look that was half of terror — terror at the magnitude of this 
ransom that was given to save him from the bondage of evil. 

“ My God ! You cannot mean it ! And you ” 

“ I shall lead the life fittest for me. I am content in it. It 
is enough.” 

The answer was very calm, but it choked him in its utter- 
ance. Before his memory rose one fair, proud face. “ Con- 
tent ! ” Ah, Heaven ! It was the only lie that had ever passed 
his lips. 

His hand lay still upon his brother’s shoulder, leaning more 
heavily there, in the silence that brooded over the hushed plains. 

“ Let us part now, and forever. Leave Algeria at once. That 
is all I ask.” 

Then, without another word that could add reproach or seek 
for gratitude, he turned and went away over the great, dim 
level of the African waste while the man whom he had saved 
sat as in stupor; gazing at the brown shadows, and the sleep- 
ing herds, and the falling stars that ran across the sky, and 
doubting whether the voice he had heard and the face upon 
which he had looked were not the visions of a waking dream. 


CHAPTEK XXXII. 


“ VENETIA. ” 

How that night was spent Cecil could never recall in full. 
Vague memories remained with him of wandering over the 
shadowy country, of seeking by bodily fatigue to kill the 
thoughts rising in him, of drinking at a little water-channel in 
the rocks as thirstily as some driven deer, of flinging himself 
down at length, worn out, to sleep under the hanging brow of 
a mighty wall of rock; of waking, when the dawn was redden- 
ing the east, with the brown plains around him, and far away 
under a knot of palms was a goatherd with his flock, like an 
idyl from the old pastoral life of Syria. He stood looking at 
the light which heralded the sun, with some indefinite sense 
of heavy loss, of fresh calamity, upon him. It was only slowly 
that he remembered all. Years seemed to have been pressed 
into the three nights and days since he had sat by the bivouac- 
fire, listening to the fiery words of the little Friend of the Flag. 

The full consciousness of all that he had surrendered in 
yielding up afresh his heritage rolled in on his memory, like 
the wave of some heavy sea that sweeps down all before it. 

When that tear-blotted and miserable letter had reached him 
in the green alleys of the Stephanien, and confessed to him 
that his brother had relied on the personal likeness between 
them and the similarity of their handwriting to pass off as his 
the bill in which his own name and that of his friend was 
forged, no thought had Aossed him to take upon himself the 
lad’s sin. It had only been when, brought under the charge, 
he must, to clear himself, have at once accused the boy, and 
have betrayed the woman whose reputation was in his keeping, 
that, rather by generous impulse than by studied intention, 
he had taken up the burden that he had now carried for so long. 
Whether or no the money-lenders had been themselves in reality 
deceived, he could never tell; but it had been certain that, hav- 
ing avowed themselves confident of his guilt, they could never 
shift the charge on to his brother in the face of his own ac- 
ceptance of it. So he had saved the youth without premedita- 


482 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


t,ion or reckoning of the cost. And now that the full cost was 
known to him, he had not shrunk back from its payment. Yet 
that payment was one that gave him a greater anguish than if 
he had laid down his life in physical martyrdom. 

To go back to the old luxury, and ease, and careless peace; 
to go back to the old, fresh, fair English woodlands, to go back 
to the power of command and the delight of free gifts, to go 
back to men’s honor, and reverence, and high esteem — these 
would have been sweet enough — sweet as food after long famine. 
But far more than these would it have been to go back and take 
the hand of his friend once more in the old, unclouded trust 
of their youth ; to go back, and stand free and blameless among 
his peers, and know that all that man could do to win the heart 
and the soul of a woman he could at his will do to win hers 
whose mere glance of careless pity had sufficed to light his life 
to passion. And he had renounced all this. This was the cost; 
and he had paid it — paid it because the simple, natural, inflexi- 
ble law of justice had demanded it. 

One whom he had once chosen to save he could not now have 
deserted, except by what would have been, in his sight, dis- 
honor. Therefore, when the day broke, and the memories of 
the night came with his awakening, he knew that his future 
was without hope — without it as utterly as was ever that of 
any captive shut in darkness, and silence, and loneliness, • in 
a prison, whose only issue was the oubliettes. There is infinite 
misery in the world, but this one misery is rare; or men would 
perish from the face of the earth as though the sun withdrew its 
light. 

Alone in that dreary scene, beautiful from its vastness and 
its solemnity, but unutterably melancholy, unutterably op- 
pressive, he also wondered whether he lived or dreamed. 

From among the reeds the ploveife were rising; over the 
barren rocks the dazzling lizards glided; afar ofl strayed the 
goats; that was the only sign of animal existence. He had 
wandered a long way from the caravanserai, and he began to 
retrace his steps, for his horse was there, and although he had 
received license to take leisure in returning, he had no home 
but the camp, no friends but those wild-eyed, leopard-like, 
ferocious sons of the razzia and the slaughter, who would 
throng around him like a pack of dogs, each eager for the first 
glance, the first word; these companions of his adversity and 
of his perils, whom he had learned to love, with all their vices 


“VENETIA.” 483 

and all their crimes, for sake of the rough, courageous love 
that they could give in answer. 

He moved slowly back over the desolate tracks of land 
stretched between him and the Algerian halting-place. He had 
no fear that he would find his brother there. He knew too well 
the nature with which he had to deal to hope that old affection 
would so have outweighed present fear that his debtor would 
have stayed to meet him yet once more. On the impulse of 
the ungovernable pain which the other’s presence had been, 
he had bidden him leave Africa at once ; now he almost 
wished that he had bid him stay. There was a weary, unsatis- 
fied longing for some touch of love or of gratitude from this 
usurper, whom he had raised in his place. He would have 
been rewarded enough if one sign of gladness that he lived had 
broken through the egotism and the stricken fear of the man 
whom he remembered as a little golden-headed child, with the 
hand of their dying mother lying in benediction on the fair, 
silken curls. 

He had asked no questions. He had gone back to no recrimi- 
nations. He guessed all it needed him to know; and he recoiled 
from the recital of the existence whose happiness was purchased 
by his own misery, and whose dignity was built on sand. His 
sacrifice had not been in vain. Placed out of the reach of 
temptation, the plastic, feminine, unstable character had been 
without a stain in the sight of men. But it was little better 
at the core; and he wondered, in his suffering, as he went on- 
ward through the beauty of the young day, whether it had been 
worth the bitter price he had paid to raise this bending reed 
from out the waters which would have broken and swamped 
it at the outset. It grew fair, and free, and flower-crowned 
now, in the midst of a tranquil and sunlit lake ; but was it 
of more value than a drifted weed bearing the snake-egg hidden 
at its root? 

He had come so far out of the ordinary route across the 
plains that it was two hours or more before he saw the dark, 
gray square of the caravanserai walls, and to its left that sin- 
gle, leaning pine growing out of a cleft within the rock that 
overhung the spot where the keenest anguish of all his life 
had known had been encountered and endured — the spot which 
yet, for sake of the one laid to rest there beneath the somber 
branches, would be forever dearer to him than any other place 
in the soil of Africa. 


484 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


While yet the caravanserai was distant, the piteous cries of 
a mother-goat caught his ear. She was bleating beside a water- 
course, into which her kid of that spring had fallen, and whose 
rapid swell, filled by the recent storm, was too strong for the 
young creature. Absorbed as he was in his own thoughts, the 
cry reached him and drew him to the spot. It was not in him 
willingly to let any living thing suffer, and he was always gentle 
to all animals. He stooped, and, with some little difficulty, 
rescued the little goat for its delighted dam. 

As he bent over the water he saw something glitter beneath 
it. He caught it in his hand and brought it up. It was the 
broken half of a chain of gold, with a jewel in each link. He 
changed color as he saw it; he remembered it as one that 
Venetia Corona had worn on the morning that he had been 
admitted to her. It was of peculiar workmanship, and he 
recognized it at once. He stood with the toy in his hand, look- 
ing long at the shining links, with their flashes of precious 
stones. They seemed to have voices that spoke to him of her 
about whose beautiful white throat they had been woven — 
voices that whispered incessantly in his ear, “ Take up your 
birthright, and you will be free to sue to her at least, if not to 
win her.” No golden and jeweled plaything ever tempted a 
starving man to theft as this tempted him now to break the 
pledge he had just given. 

His birthright! He longed for it for this woman’s sake — 
for the sake, at least, of the right to stand before her as an 
equal, and to risk his chance with others who sought her smile — 
as he had never done for any other thing which, with that 
heritage, would have become his. Yet he knew that, even were 
he to be false to his word, and go forward and claim his right, 
he would never be able to prove his innocence; he would never 
hope to make the world believe him unless the real criminal 
made that confession which he held himself forbidden, by his 
own past action, ever to extort. 

He gazed long at the broken, costly toy, while his heart 
ached with a cruel pang ; then he placed it in safety in the little 
blue enamel box, beside the ring which Cigarette had flung 
back to him, and went onward to the caravanserai. She was 
no longer there, in all probability; but the lost bagatelle would 
give him, some time or another, a plea on which to enter her 
presence. It was a pleasure to him to know that; though he 
knew also that every added moment spent under the sweet 


“ VENETIA.” 485 

sovereignty of her glance was so much added pain, so much 
added folly, to the dream-like and baseless passion with which 
she had inspired him. 

The trifling incident of the goat’s rescue and the chain’s 
trouvaille, slight as they were, still were of service to him. 
They called him back from the past to the present; they broke 
the stupor of suffering that had fastened on him; they recalled 
him to the actual world about him in which he had to fulfill 
his duties as a trooper of France. 

It was almost noon when, under the sun-scorched branches 
of the pine that stretched its somber fans up against the glit- 
tering azure of the morning skies, he approached the gates of 
the Algerine house-of-call — a study for the color of Gerome, 
with the pearly gray of its stone tints, and the pigeons wheel- 
ing above its corner towers, while under the arch of its entrance 
a string of mules, maize-laden, were guided; and on its bench 
sat a French fantassin, singing gayly songs of Paris while he 
out open a yellow gourd. 

Cecil went within, and bathed, and dressed, and drank some 
of the thin, cool wine that found its way thither in the wake 
of the French army. Then he sat down for a while at one of 
the square, cabin-like holes which served for casements in the 
tower he occupied, and, looking out into the court, tried to 
shape his thoughts and plan his course. As a soldier he had 
no freedom, no will of his own, save for this extra twelve or 
twenty-four hours which they had allowed him for leisure in 
his return journey. He was obliged to go back to his camp, 
and there, he knew, he might again encounter one whose tender 
memories would be as quick to recognize him as the craven 
dread of his brother had been. He had always feared this 
ordeal, although the arduous service in which his chief years 
in Africa had been spent, and the remote expeditions on which 
he had always been employed, had partially removed him from 
the ever-present danger of such recognition until now. And 
now he felt that if once the brave, kind eyes of his old friend 
should meet his own, concealment would be no longer possible; 
yet, for sake of that promise he had sworn in the past night, it 
must be maintained at every hazard, every cost. Vacantly he 
sat and watched the play of the sunshine in the prismatic water 
of the courtyard fountain, and the splashing, and the pluming, 
and the murmuring of the doves and pigeons on its edge. He 
felt meshed in«a net from which there was no escape — none — 


486 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


unless, on his homeward passage, a thrust of Arab steel should 
give him liberty. 

The trampling of horses on the pavement below roused his 
attention. A thrill of hope went through him that his brother 
might have lingering conscience, latent love enough, to have 
made him refuse to obey the bidding to leave Africa. He rose 
and leaned out. Amid the little throng of riding-horses, 
grooms, and attendants who made an open way through the 
polyglot crowd of an Algerian caravanserai at noon, he saw 
the one dazzling face of which he had so lately dreamed by the 
water-freshet in the plains. It was but a moment’s glance, for 
she had already dismounted from her mare, and was passing 
within with two other ladies of her party; but in that one 
glance he knew her. His discovery of the chain gave him a 
plea to seek her. Should he avail himself of it? He hesitated 
a while. It would be safest, wisest, best, to deliver up the 
trinket to her courier, and pass on his way without another look 
at that beauty which could never be his, which could never 
lighten for him even with the smile that a woman may give her 
equal or her friend. She could never be aught to him save 
one more memory of pain, save one remembrance the more to 
embitter the career which not even hope would ever illumine. 
He knew that it was only madness to go into her presence, and 
feed, with the cadence of her voice, the gold light of her hair, 
the grace and graciousness of her every movement, the love 
which she would deem such intolerable insult, that, did he ever 
speak it, she would order her people to drive him from her like 
a chidden hound. He knew that; but he longed to indulge the 
madness, despite it; and he did so. He went down into the 
court below, and found her suite. 

“ Tell your mistress that I, Louis Victor, have some jewels 
which belong to her, and ask her permission to restore them 
to her hands,” he said to one of her equerries. 

“ Give them to me, if you have picked them up,” said the 
man, putting out his hand for them. 

Cecil closed his own upon them. 

“ Go and do as I bid you.” 

The equerry paused, doubtful whether or no to resist the 
tone and the words. A Frenchman’s respect for the military 
uniform prevailed. He went within. 

In the best chamber of the caravanserai Venetia Corona was 
sitting, listless in the heat, when her attendant entered. The 


“ VEKETIA.” 487 

grandes dames who w T ere her companions in their tour through 
the seat of war were gone to their siesta. She was alone, with 
a scarlet burnous thrown about her, and upon her all the lan- 
guor and idleness common to the noontide, which was still very 
warm, though, in the autumn, the nights were so icily cold on 
the exposed level of the plains. She was lost in thought, more- 
over. She had heard, the day before, a story that had touched 
her — of a soldier who had been slain crossing the plains, and 
had been brought, through the hurricane and the sandstorm, 
at every risk, by his comrade, who had chosen to endure all 
peril and wretchedness rather than leave the dead body to the 
vultures and the kites. It was a nameless story to her — the 
story of two obscure troopers, who, for aught she knew, might 
have been two of the riotous and savage brigands that were 
common in the Army of Africa. But the loyalty and the love 
shown in it had moved her; and to the woman whose life had 
been cloudless and cradled in ease from her birth, there was 
that in the suffering and the sacrifice which the anecdote sug- 
gested, that had at once the fascination of the unknown, and 
the pathos of a life so far removed from her, so little dreamed 
of by her, that all its coarser cruelty was hidden, while only 
its unutterable sadness and courage remained before her sight. 

Had she, could she, ever have seen it in its realities, watched 
and read and understood it, she would have been too intensely 
revolted to have perceived the actual, latent nobility possible 
in such an existence. As it was, she heard but of it in such 
words as alone could meet the ear of a great lady ; she gazed at 
it only in pity from » far-distant height, and its terrible tragedy 
had solemnity and beauty for her. 

When her servant approached her now with Cecil’s message 
she hesitated some few moments in surprise. She had not 
known that he was in her vicinity. The story she had heard 
had been simply of two unnamed Chasseurs d’Afrique, and he 
himself might have fallen on the field weeks before, for aught 
that she had heard of him. Some stray rumors of his defense 
of the encampment of Zaraila, and of the fine prowess shown 
in his last charge, alone had drifted to her. He was but a 
trooper; and he fought in Africa. The world had no concern 
with him, save the miniature world of his own regiment. 

She hesitated some moments; then gave the required per- 
mission. “He has once been a gentleman; it would be cruel 
to wound him,” thought the imperial beauty, who would have 


488 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


refused a prince or neglected a duke with chill indifference, 
but who was too generous to risk the semblance of humiliation 
to the man who could never approach her save upon such suf- 
ferance as was in itself mortification to one whose pride sur- 
vived his fallen fortunes. 

Moreover, the interest he had succeeded in awakening in her, 
the mingling of pity and of respect that his words and his 
bearing had aroused, was not extinct; had, indeed, only been 
strengthened by the vague stories that had of late floated to 
her of the day of Zaraila; of the day of smoke and steel and 
carnage, of war in its grandest yet its most frightful shape, 
of the darkness of death which the courage of human souls had 
power to illumine as the rays of the sun the tempest-cloud. 
Something more like quickened and pleasured expectation than 
any one among her many lovers had ever had power to rouse, 
moved her as she heard of the presence of the man who, in that 
day, had saved the honor of his Flag. She came of a heroic 
race; she had heroic blood in her; and heroism, physical and 
moral, won her regard as no other quality could ever do. A man 
capable of daring greatly, and of suffering silently, was the 
only man who could ever hope to hold her thoughts. 

The room was darkened from the piercing light without ; and 
in its gloom, as he was ushered in, the scarlet of her cashmere 
and the gleam of her fair hair was all that, for the moment, 
he could see. He bowed very low that he might get his calm- 
ness back before he looked at her; and her voice in its linger- 
ing music came on his ear. 

“You have found my chain, I think? I lost it in riding yes- 
terday. I am greatly indebted to you for taking care of it.” 

She felt that she could only thank, as she would have thanked 
an equal who should have done her this sort of slight service, 
the man who had brought to her the gold pieces with which his 
Colonel had insulted him. 

“ It is I, madame, who am the debtor of so happy an acci- 
dent.” 

His words were very low, and his voice shook a little over 
them; he was thinking not of the jeweled toy that he came here 
to restore, but of the inheritance that had passed away from 
him forever, and which, possessed, would have given him the 
title to seek what his own efforts could do to wake a look of 
tenderness in those proud eyes which men ever called so cold, 
but which he felt might still soften, and change, and grow dark 


“VENETIA.” 489 

with the thoughts and the passions of love, if the soul that 
gazed through them were but once stirred from its repose. 

“ Your chain is here, madame, though broken, I regret to 
see,” he continued, as he took the little box from his coat and 
handed it to her. She took it, and thanked him, without, for 
the moment, opening the enamel case as she motioned him to 
a seat at a little distance from her own. 

“ You have been in terrible scenes since I saw you last,” she 
continued. “ The story of Zaraila reached us. Surely they 
cannot refuse you the reward of your service now ? ” 

“ It will make little difference, madame, whether they do or 
not.” 

“ Little difference ! How is that ? ” 

“To my own fate, I meant. Whether I be captain or a 
corporal cannot alter ” 

He paused; he dreaded lest the words should escape him 
which should reveal to her that which she would regard as such 
intolerable offense, such insolent indignity, when felt for her 
by a soldier in the grade he held. 

“Ho? Yet such recognition is usually the ambition of every 
military life.” 

A very weary smile passed over his face. 

“ I have no ambition, madame. Or, if I have, it is not a 
pair of epaulettes that will content it.” 

She understood him; she comprehended the bitter mockery 
that the tawdry, meretricious rewards of regimental decoration 
seemed to the man who had waited to die at Zaraila as patiently 
and as grandly as the Old Guard at Waterloo. 

“ I understand ! The rewards are pitifully disproportionate 
to the services in any army. Yet how magnificently you and 
your men, as I have been told, held your ground all through that 
fearful day ! ” 

“We did our duty — nothing more.” 

“Well! is not that the rarest thing among men?” 

“Hot among soldiers, madame.” 

“ Then you think that every trooper in a regiment is actu- ' 
ated by the finest and most impersonal sentiment that can actu- 
ate human beings ! ” 

“I will not say that. Poor wretches! they are degraded 
enough, too often. But I believe that more or less in every good 
soldier, even when he is utterly unconscious of it, is an im- 
personal love for the honor of his Flag, an uncalculating in- 


490 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


stinct to do his best for the reputation of his corps. We are 
called human machines; we are so, since we move by no will 
of our own; but the lowest among us will at times be propelled 
by one single impulse — a desire to die greatly. It is all that is 
left to most of us to do.” 

She looked at him with that old look which he had seen once 
or twice before in her, of pity, respect, sympathy, and wonder, 
all in one. He spoke to her as he had never spoken to any 
living being. The grave, quiet, listless impassiveness that still 
was habitual with him — relic of the old habits of his former 
life — was very rarely broken, for his real nature or his real 
thoughts to be seen beneath it. But she, so far removed from 
him by position and by circumstance, and distant with him as 
a great lady could not but be with a soldier of whose ante- 
cedents and whose character she knew nothing, gave him sym- 
pathy, a sympathy that was sweet and rather felt than uttered; 
and it was like balm to a wound, like sweet melodies on a weary 
ear, to the man who had carried his secret so silently and so 
long, without one to know his burden or to soothe his pain. 

" Yes,” she said thoughtfully, while over the brilliancy of 
her face there passed a shadow. " There must be infinite no- 
bility among these men, who live without hope^ — live only to 
die. That soldier, a day or two ago, who brought his dead com- 
rade through the hurricane, risking his own death rather than 
leave the body to the carrion-birds — you have heard of him? 
What tenderness, what greatness there must have been in that 
poor fellow’s heart!” 

" Oh, no ! That was nothing.” 

“ Nothing! They have told me he came every inch of the 
way in danger of the Arabs’ shot and steel. He had suffered 
so much to bring the body safe across the plains, he fell down 
insensible on his entrance here.” 

" You set too much store on it. I owed him a debt far greater 
than any act like that could ever repay.” 

" You ! Was it you ? ” 

"Yes, madame. He who perished had a thousandfold more 
of such nobility as you have praised than I.” 

"Ah! Tell me of him,” she said simply; but he saw that 
the lustrous eyes bent on him had a grave, sweet sadness in 
them that was more precious and more pitiful than a million 
utterances of regret could ever have been. 

Those belied her much who said that she was heartless; 


491 


“ VENETIA.” 

though grief had never touched her, she could feel keenly the 
grief of other lives. He obeyed her bidding now, and told her, 
in brief words, the story, which had a profound pathos spoken 
there, where without, through the oval, unglazed casement in 
the distance, there was seen the tall, dark, leaning pine that 
overhung the grave of yesternight — the story over which his 
voice oftentimes fell with the hush of a cruel pain in it, and 
which he could have related to no other save herself. It had 
an intense melancholy and a strange beauty in its brevity and 
its simplicity, told in that gaunt, still, darkened chamber of the 
caravanserai, with the gray gloom of its stone walls around, 
and the rays of the golden sunlight from without straying in 
to touch the glistening hair of the proud head that bent for- 
ward to listen to the recital. Her face grew paler as she heard ; 
and a mist was over the radiance of her azure eyes ; that death 
in the loneliness of the plains moved her deeply with the grand 
simplicity of its unconscious heroism. And, though he spoke 
little of himself, she felt, with all the divination of a woman’s 
sympathies, how he who told her this thing had suffered by it — 
suffered far more than the comrade whom he had laid down in 
the grave where, far off in the noonday warmth, the young goats 
were at rest on the sod. When he ceased, there was a long 
silence; he had lost even the memory of her in the memory of 
the death that he had painted to her; and she was moved with 
that wondering pain, that emotion, half dread and half regret, 
with which the contemplation of calamities that have never 
touched, and that can never touch them, will move women far 
more callous, far more world-chilled than herself. 

In the silence her hands toyed listlessly with the enamel 
bonbonniere, whose silver had lost all its bright enameling, and 
was dinted and dulled till it looked no more than lead. The lid 
came off at her touch as she musingly moved it round and 
round ; the chain and the ring fell into her lap ; the lid remained 
in her hand, its interior unspoiled and studded in its center 
with one name in turquoise letters — “ Venetia.” 

She started as the word caught her eye and broke her reverie ; 
the color came warmer into her cheek; she looked closer and 
closer at the box; then, with a rapid movement, turned her 
head and gazed at her companion. 

“ How did you obtain this ? ” 

“ The chain, madame? It had fallen in the water.” 

“ The chain! Ho! the box!” 


492 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


He looked at her in surprise. 

“ It was given me very long ago.” 

“ And by whom ? ” 

“By a young child, madame.” 

Her lips parted slightly, the flush on her cheeks deepened; 
the beautiful face, which the Roman sculptor had m said only 
wanted tenderness to make it perfect, changed, moved, was, 
quickened with a thousand shadows of thought. 

“ The box is mine ! I gave it ! And you ? ” 

He rose to his feet, and stood entranced before her, breath- 
less and mute. 

“ And you ? ” she repeated. 

He was silent still, gazing at her. He knew her now — how 
had he been so blind as never to guess the truth before, as never 
to know that those imperial eyes and that diadem of golden 
hair could belong alone but to the women of one race? 

“ And you ? ” she cried once more, while she stretched her 
hand out to him. “ And you — you are Philip’s friend ? you 
are Bertie Cecil ? ” 

Silently he bowed his head; not even for his brother’s sake, 
or for the sake of his pledged word, could he have lied to her. 

But her outstretched hands he would not see, he would not 
take. The shadow of an imputed crime was stretched between 
them. 

“ Petite Reine ! ” he murmured. “ Ah, God ! how could I be 
so blind ? ” 

She grew T very pale as she sank back again upon the couch 
from which she had risen. It seemed to her as though a thou- 
sand years had drifted by since she had stood beside this man 
under the summer leaves of the Stephanien, and he had kissed 
her childish lips, and thanked her for her loving gift. And 
now — they had met thus! 

He said nothing. He stood paralyzed, gazing at her. There 
had been no added bitterness needed in the cup which he drank 
for his brother’s sake, yet this bitterness surpassed all other; it 
seemed beyond his strength to leave her in the belief that he 
was guilty. She in whom all fair and gracious things were 
met ; she who was linked by her race to his past and his youth ; 
she whose clear eyes in her childhood had looked upon him in 
that first hour of the agony that he had suffered then, and still 
suffered on, in the cause of a coward and an ingrate. 

She was pale still; and her eyes were fixed on him with a 



Photo by Sarony 





“ VENETIA.” 493 

gaze that recalled to him the look with which “ Petite Reine ” 
had promised that summer day to keep his secret, and tell none 
of that misery of which she had been witness. 

“ They thought that you were dead,” she said at length, while 
her voice sank very low. “ Why have you lived like this ? ” 

He made no answer. 

“ It was cruel to Philip,” she went on, while her voice still 
shook. “ Child though I was, I remember his passion of grief 
when the news came that you had lost your life. He has never 
forgotten you. So often now he will still speak of you ! He is 
in your camp. We are traveling together. He will be here 
this evening. What delight it will give him to know his dear- 
est friend is living! But why — why — have kept him igno- 
rant, if you were lost to all the world beside ? ” 

Still he answered her nothing. The truth he could not tell; 
the lie he would not. She paused, waiting reply. Receiving 
none, she spoke once more, her words full of that exquisite soft- 
ness which was far more beautiful in her than in women 
less tranquil, less chill, and less negligent in ordinary mo- 
ments. 

“ Mr. Cecil, I divined rightly ! I knew that you were far 
higher than your grade in Africa ; I felt that in all things, save 
in some accident of position, we were equals. But why have 
you condemned yourself to this misery? Your life is brave, is 
noble, but it must be a constant torture to such as you? I 
remember well what you were — so well, that I wonder we have 
never recognized each other before now. The existence you lead 
in Algeria must be very terrible to you, though it is greater, 
in truth, than your old years of indolence.” 

He sank down beside her on a low seat, and bowed his head 
on his hands for some moments. He knew that he must leave 
this woman whom he loved, and who knew him now as one 
whom in her childhood she had seen caressed and welcomed by 
all her race, to hold him guilty of this wretched, mean, and 
fraudulent thing, under whose charge he had quitted her coun- 
try. Great dews of intense pain gathered on his forehead; his 
whole mind, and heart, and soul revolted against this brand 
of a guilt not his own that was stamped on him ; he could have 
cried out to her the truth in all the eloquence of a breaking 
heart. 

But he knew that his lips had been sealed by his own choice 
forever; and the old habits of his early life were strong upon 


494 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


him still. He lifted his head and spoke gently, and very quietly, 
though she caught the tremor that shook through the words. 

“Do not let us speak of myself. You see what my life is; 
there is no more to be said. Tell me rather of your own story — 
you are no longer the Lady Yenetia? You have been wedded 
and widowed, they say ? ” 

“ The wife of an hour — yes ! But it is of yourself that I 
would hear. Why have left the world, and, above all, why have 
left us, to think you dead? I was not so young when we last 
saw you, but that I remember well how all my people loved 
you.” 

Had she been kept in ignorance of the accusation beneath 
which his flight had been made? He began to think so. It 
was possible. She had been so young a child when he had left 
for Africa; then the story was probably withheld from reach- 
ing her; and now, what memory had the world to give a man 
whose requiem it had said twelve long years before? In all 
likelihood she had never heard his name, save from her brother’s 
lips, that had been silent on the shame of his old comrade. 

“ Leave my life alone, for God’s sake ! ” he said passionately. 
“ Tell me of your own — tell me, above all, of his. He loved me, 
you say? — O Heaven! he did! Better than any creature that 
ever breathed; save the man whose grave lies yonder.” 

• “ He does so still,” she answered eagerly. “ Philip’s is not 
a heart that forgets. It is a heart of gold, and the name of his 
earliest friend is graven on it as deeply now as ever. He thinks 
you dead ; to-night will be the happiest hour he has ever known 
when he shall meet you here.” 

He rose hastily, and moved thrice to and fro the narrow 
floor whose rugged earth had been covered with furs and rugs 
lest it should strike a chill to her as she passed over it; the tor- 
ture grew unsupportabie to him. And yet, it had so much of 
sweetness that he was powerless to end it — sweetness in the 
knowledge that she knew him now her equal, at least by birth; 
in the change that it had made in her voice and her glance, 
while the first grew tender with olden memories, and the last 
had the smile of friendship; in the closeness of the remem- 
brances that seemed to draw and bind them together; in the 
swift sense that in an instant, by the utterance of a name, 
the ex-barrier of caste which had been between them had fallen 
now and forever. 

She watched him with grave, musing eyes. She was moved, 


“ VENETIA.” 4y& 

startled, softened to a profound pity for him, and filled with 
a wondering of regret; yet a strong emotion of relief, of pleas- 
ure, rose above these. She had never forgotten the man to 
whom, in her childish innocence, she had brought the gifts of 
her golden store; she was glad that he lived, though he lived 
thus, glad with a quicker, warmer, more vivid emotion than any 
that had ever occupied her for any man living or dead except 
her brother. The interest she had vaguely felt in a stranger’s 
fortunes, and which she had driven contemptuously away as 
unworthy of her harboring, was justified for one whom her peo- 
ple had known and valued while she had been in her infancy, 
and of whom she had never heard from her brother’s lips aught 
except constant regret and imperishable attachment. For it 
was true, as Cecil divined, that the dark cloud under which his 
memory had passed to all in England had never been seen by 
her eyes, from which, in childhood, it had been screened, and, 
in womanhood, withheld, because his name had been absolutely 
forgotten by all save the Seraph, to whom it had been fraught 
with too much pain for its utterance to be ever voluntary. 

“ What is it you fear from Philip ? ” she asked him, at last, 
w T hen she had waited vainly for him to break the silence. “ You 
can remember him but ill if you think that there will be any- 
thing in his heart save joy when he shall know that you 
are living. You little dream how dear your memory is to 
him ” 

He paused before her abruptly. 

“ Hush, hush ! or you will kill me ! Why ! — three nights ago 
I fled the camp as men flee pestilence, because I saw his face 
in the light of the bivouac-fire and dreaded that he should so 
see mine ! ” 

She gazed at him in troubled amaze; there was that in the 
passionate agitation of this man who had been serene through 
so much danger, and unmoved beneath so much disaster, that 
startled and bewildered her. 

‘‘You fled from Philip? Ah! how you must wrong him! 
What will it matter to him whether you be prince or trooper, 
wear a peer’s robes or a soldier’s uniform? His friendship 
never yet was given to externals. But — stay! — that reminds 
me of your inheritance. Do you know that Lord Royallieu is 
dead? that your younger brother bears the title, thinking you 
perished at Marseilles ? He was here with me yesterday ; he has 
come to Algeria for the autumn. Whatever your motive may 


496 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


have been to remain thus hidden from us all, you must claim 
your own rights now. You must go back to all that is so justly 
yours. Whatever your reason be to have borne with all the 
suffering and the indignity that have been your portion here, 
they will be ended now.” 

Her beauty had never struck him so intensely as at this mo- 
ment, when, in urging him to the demand of his rights, she 
so unconsciously tempted 'him to betray his brother and to for- 
sake his word. The indifference and the careless coldness that 
had to so many seemed impenetrable and unalterable in her 
were broken and had changed to the warmth of sympathy, of 
interest, of excitation. There was a world of feeling in her 
face, of eloquence in her eyes, as she stooped slightly forward 
with the rich glow of the cashmeres about her, and the sun- 
gleam falling across her brow. Pure, and proud, and noble in 
every thought, and pressing on him only what was the due of 
his birth and his heritage, she yet unwittingly tempted him 
with as deadly a power as though she were the vilest of her sex, 
seducing him downward to some infamous dishonor. 

To do what she said would be but his actual right, and would 
open to him a future so fair that his heart grew sick with 
longing for it; and yet to yield, and to claim justice for him- 
self, was forbidden him as utterly as though it were some mur- 
derous guilt. He had promised never to sacrifice his brother;, 
the promise held him like the fetters of a galley slave. 

“ Why do you not answer me ? ” she pursued, while she leaned 
nearer with wonder, and doubt, and a certain awakening dread 
shadowing the blue luster of her eyes that were bent so thought- 
fully, so searchingly, upon him. “ Is it possible that you have 
heard of your inheritance, of your title and estates, and that 
you voluntarily remain a soldier here? Lord Royallieu must 
yield them in the instant you prove your identity, and in that 
there could be no difficulty. I remember you well now, and 
Philip, I am certain, will only need to see you once to ” 

“ Hush, for pity’s sake ! Have you never heard — have none 

ever told you ” 

“ What?” 

Her face grew paler with a vague sense of fear; she knew 
that he had been equable and resolute under the severest tests 
that could try the strength and the patience of man, and she 
knew, therefore, that no slender thing could agitate and could 
unman him thus. 


“ VEKETIA.” 497 

“ What is it I should have heard ? ” she asked him, as he kept 
his silence. 

He turned from her so that she could not see his face. 

“ That, when I became dead to the world, I died with the 
taint of crime on me ! ” 

“ Of crime ? ” 

An intense horror thrilled through the echo of the word ; but 
she rose, and moved, and faced him with the fearless resolve of 
a woman whom no half-truth would blind, and no shadowy 
terror appall. 

“ Of crime ? What crime ? ” 

Then, and then only, he looked at her, a strange, fixed, hope- 
less, yet serene look, that she knew no criminal ever would or 
could have given. 

“ I was accused of having forged your brother’s name.” 

A faint cry escaped her; her lips grew white, and her eyes 
darkened and dilated. 

“Accused. But wrongfully?” 

His breath came and went in quick, sharp spasms. 

“ I could not prove that.” 

“ Hot prove it ? Why ? ” 

“ I could not.” 

“ But he — Philip — never believed you guilty ? ” 

“ I cannot tell. He may ; he must.” 

“ But you are not ! ” 

It was not an interrogation, but an affirmation that rang out 
in the silver clearness of her voice. There was not a single 
intonation of doubt in it ; there was rather a haughty authority 
that forbade even himself to say that one of his race and that 
one of his Order could have been capable of such ignoble and 
craven sin. 

His mouth quivered, a bitter sigh broke from him ; he turned 
his eyes on her with a look that pierced her to the heart. 

“ Think me guilty or guiltless, as you will ; I cannot answer 
you.” 

His last words were suffocated with the supreme anguish of 
their utterance. As she heard it, the generosity, the faith, the 
inherent justice, and the intrinsic sweetness that were latent 
in her beneath the negligence and the chillness of external 
semblance rose at once to reject the baser, to accept the nobler, 
belief offered to her choice. She had lived much in the world, 
but it had not corroded her; she had acquired keen discernment 


498 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


from it, but she had preserved all the courageous and the 
chivalrous instincts of her superb nature. She looked at him 
now, and stretched her hands out toward him with a royal and 
gracious gesture of infinite eloquence. 

“You are guiltless, whatever circumstance may have ar- 
rayed against you, whatever shadow of evil may have fallen 
falsely on you. Is it not so ? ” 

He bowed his head low over her hands as he took them. In 
that moment half the bitterness of his doom passed from him; 
he had at least her faith. But his face was bloodless as that 
of a corpse, and the loud beatings of his heart were audible 
on the stillness. This faith must live on without one thing to 
show that he deserved it; if, in time to come, it should waver 
and fall, and leave him in the darkness of the foul suspicion 
under which he dwelt, what wonder would there be? 

He lifted his head and looked her full in the eyes; her own 
closed involuntarily, and filled with tears. She felt that the 
despair and the patience of that look would haunt her until 
her dying day. 

“ I was guiltless ; but none could credit it then ; none would 
do so now; nor can I seek to make them. Ask me no more; 
give me your belief, if you can — God knows what precious 
mercy it is to me; but leave me to fulfill my fate, and tell no 
living creature what I have told you now.” 

The great tears stood in her eyes, and blinded her as she 
heard. Even in the amaze and the vagueness of this first knowl- 
edge of the cause of his exile she felt instinctively, as the Little 
One also had done, that some great sacrifice, some great forti- 
tude and generosity, lay within this sealed secret of his suffer- 
ance of wrong. She knew, too, that it would be useless to seek 
to learn that which he had chosen to conceal ; that for no slender 
cause could he have come out to lead this life of whose suffer- 
ings she could gauge the measure ; that nothing save some abso- 
lute and imperative reason could have driven him to accept 
such living death as was his doom in Africa. 

“ Tell no one ! ” she echoed. “ What ! not Philip even ? not 
your oldest friend. Ah! be sure, whatever the evidence might 
be against you, his heart never condemned you for one instant.” 

“ I believe it. Yet all you can do for me, all I implore you 
to do for me, is to keep silence forever on my name. To-day, 
accident has made me break a vow I never thought but to keep 
sacred. When you recognized me, I could not deny myself, I 


“VENETIA.” 499 

could not lie to you; but, for God’s sake, tell none of what has 
passed between us ! ” 

“ But why ? ” she pursued — “ why ? You lie under this charge 
still — you cannot disprove it, you say; but why not come out 
before the world, and state to all what you swear now to me, 
and claim your right to bear your father’s honors ? If you were 
falsely accused, there must have been some guilty in your 
stead; and if ” 

“ Cease, for pity’s sake! Forget I ever told you I was guilt- 
less ! Blot my memory out ; think of me as dead, as I have been, 
till your eyes called me back to life. Think that I am branded 
with the theft of your brother’s name ; think that I am vile, and 
shameless, and fallen as the lowest wretch that pollutes this 
army ; think of me as what you will, but not as innocent ! ” 

The words broke out in a torrent from him, bearing down 
with them all his self-control, as the rush of waters bears away 
all barriers that have long dammed their course. They were 
wild, passionate, incoherent; unlike any that had ever passed 
his lips, or been poured out in her presence. He felt mad with 
the struggle that tore him asunder, the longing to tell the truth 
to her, though he should never after look upon her face again, 
and the honor which bound silence on him for sake of the man 
whom he had sworn under no temptation to dispossess and to 
betray. 

She heard him silently, with her grand, meditative eyes, in 
which the slow tears still floated, fixed upon him. Most women 
would have thought that conscious guilt spoke in the violence 
of his self-accusation; she did not. Her intuition was too fine, 
her sympathies too true. She felt that he feared, not that she 
should unjustly think him guilty, but that she should justly 
think him guiltless. She knew that this, whatever its root 
might be, was the fear of the stainless, not of the criminal 
life. 

“ I hear you,” she answered him gently ; “ but I do not believe 
you, even against yourself. The man whom Philip loved and 
honored never sank to the base fraud of a thief.” 

Her glorious eyes were still on him as she spoke, seeming 
to read his very soul. Under that glance all the manhood, all 
the race, all the pride, and the love, and the courage within him 
refused to bear in her sight the shame of an alien crime, and 
rose in revolt to fling off the bondage that forced him to stand 
as a criminal before the noble gaze of this woman. His eyes 


500 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


met hers full, and rested on them without wavering; his head 
was raised, and his carriage had a fearless dignity. 

“No. I was innocent. But in honor I must bear the yoke 
that I took on me long ago; in honor I can never give you or 
any living soul the proof that this crime was not mine. I 
thought that I should go to my grave without any ever hearing 
of the years that I have passed in Africa, without any ever 
learning the name I used to bear. As it is, all I can ask is now 
— to be forgotten.” 

His voice fell before the last words, and faltered over them. 
It was bitter to ask only for oblivion from the woman 'whom 
he loved with all the strength of a sudden passion born in utter 
hopelessness; the woman whose smile, whose beauty, whose love 
might even possibly have been won as his own in the future, 
if he could have claimed his birthright. So bitter that, rather 
than have spoken those words of resignation, he would have 
been led out by a platoon of his own soldiery and shot in the 
autumn sunlight beside Rake’s grave. 

“ You ask what will not be mine to give,” she answered him, 
while a great weariness stole through her own words, for she 
was bewildered, and pained, and oppressed with a new, strange 
sense of helplessness before this man’s nameless suffering. 
“ Remember — I knew you so well in my earliest years, and you 
are so dear to the one dearest to me. It will not be possible 
to forget such a meeting as this. Silence, of course, you can 
command from me, if you insist on it; but ” 

“ I command nothing from you ; but I implore it. It is 
the sole mercy you can show. Never, for God’s sake! speak of 
me to your brother or to mine.” 

“ Do you so mistrust Philip’s affection ? ” 

“ No. It is because I trust it too entirely.” 

“ Too entirely to do what? ” 

“ To deal it fruitless pain. As you love him — as you pity 
me — pray that he and I never meet ! ” 

“ But why ? If all this could be cleared ” 

“ It never can be.” 

The baffled sense of impotence against the granite wall of 
some immovable calamity which she had felt before came on 
her. She had been always used to be obeyed, followed, and 
caressed; to see obstacles crumble, difficulties disappear, before 
her wish; she had not been tried by any sorrow, save when, 
a mere child still, she felt the pain of her father’s death; she 


“VENETIA.” 501 

had been lapped in softest luxury, crowned with easiest victory. 
The sense that here there was a tragedy whose meaning she 
could not reach, that there was here a fate that she could not 
change or soften, brought a strange, unfamiliar feeling of weak- 
ness before a hopeless and cruel doom that was no more to be 
altered by her will than the huge, bare rocks of Africa, out 
yonder in the glare of noon, were to be lifted by her hand. For 
she knew that this man, who made so light of perils that would 
have chilled many to the soul in terror, and who bore so quiet 
and serene a habit beneath the sharpest stings and hardest blows 
of his adversities, would not speak thus without full warrant; 
would not consign himself to this renunciation of every hope, 
unless he were compelled to it by a destiny from which there 
was no escape. 

She was silent some moments, her eyes resting on him with 
that grave and luminous regard which no man had ever changed 
to one more tender or less calmly contemplative. He had risen 
again, and paced to and fro the narrow chamber; his head bent 
down, his chest rising and falling with the labored, quickened 
breath. He had thought that the hour in which his brother’s 
ingratitude had pierced his heart had been the greatest suffer- 
ing he had ever known, or ever could know; but a greater had 
waited on him here, in the fate to which the jeweled toy that 
he had lifted from the water had accidentally led him, not 
dreaming to what he came. 

“ Lord Royallieu,” she said softly, at length, while she rose 
and moved toward him, the scarlet of the trailing cashmeres 
gathering dark, ruby lights in them as they caught sun and 
shadow; and at the old name, uttered in her voice, he started, 
and turned, and looked at her as though he saw some ghost 
of his past life rise from its grave. “ Why look at me so ? ” 
she pursued ere he could speak. “ Act how you will, you can- 
not change the fact that you are the bearer of your father’s 
title. So long as you live, your brother Berkeley can never take 
it legally. You may be a Chasseur of the African Army, but 
none the less are you a Peer of England.” 

“ What matters that ? ” he muttered. “ Why tell me that ? 
I have said I am dead. Leave me buried here, and let him 
enjoy what he may — what he can.” 

“ But this is folly — madness ” 

“ Ho; it is neither. I have told you I should stand as a felon 
in the eyes of the English law; I should have no civil rights; 


502 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


the greatest mercy fate can show me is to let me remain for- 
gotten here. It will not be long, most likely, before I am thrust 
into the African sand, to rot like that brave soul out yonder. 
Berkeley will be the lawful holder of the title then; leave him 
in peace and possession now.” 

He spoke the words out to the end — calmly, and with un- 
faltering resolve. But she saw the great dews gather on his 
temples, where silver threads were just glistening among the 
bright richness of his hair, and she heard the short, low, con- 
vulsive breathing with which his chest heaved as he spoke. She 
stood close beside him, and gazed once more full in his eyes, 
while the sweet, imperious cadence of her voice answered him: 

“ There is more than I know of here. Either you are the 
greatest madman, or the most generous man that ever lived. 
You choose to guard your own secret; I will not seek to per- 
suade it from you. But tell me one thing — why do you thus 
abjure your rights, permit a false charge to rest on you, and 
consign yourself forever to this cruel agony ? ” 

His lips shook under his beard as he answered her. 

“Because I can do no less in honor. For God’s sake, do 
not you tempt me ! ” 

A quick, deep sigh escaped her as she heard; her face grew 
very pale, as it had done before, and she moved slightly from 
him. 

“ Forgive me,” she said, after a long pause. “ I will never ask 
you that again.” 

She could honor honor too well, and too well divine all that 
he suffered for its sake, ever to become his temptress in bid- 
ding him forsake it; yet, with a certain weariness, a certain 
dread, wholly unfamiliar to her, she realized that what he had 
chosen was the choice not of his present or of his future. It 
could have no concern for her, — save that long years ago he 
had been the best-loved friend of her best-loved relative, — 
whether or no he remained lost to all the world under the un- 
known name of a French Chasseur. And yet it smote her with 
a certain dull, unanalyzed pain ; it gave her a certain emotion of 
powerlessness and of hopelessness to realize that he would re- 
main all his years through, until an Arab’s shot should set him 
free, under this bondage of renunciation, beneath this yoke 
of service. She stood silent long, leaning against the oval of the 
casement, with the sun shed over the glowing cashmeres that 
swept round her. He stood apart in silence also. What could 


“ VENETIA.” 503 

he say to her? His whole heart longed with an unutterable 
longing to tell her the truth, and bid her be his judge between 
him and his duty; but his promise hung on him like a leaden 
weight. He must remain speechless — and leave her, for doubt 
to assail her, and for scorn to follow it in her thoughts of him, 
if so they would. 

Heavy as had been the curse to him of that one hour in 
which honor had forbade him to compromise a woman’s repu- 
tation, and old tenderness had forbade him to betray a brother’s 
sin, he had never paid so heavy a price for his act as that which 
he paid now. 

Through the yellow sunlight without, over the barren, dust- 
strewn plains, in the distance there approached three riders, 
accompanied by a small escort of Spahis, with their crimson 
burnous floating in the autumnal wind. She started, and 
turned to him. 

“ It is Philip ! He is coming for me from your camp to-day.” 

His eyes strained through the sun-glare. 

“Ah, God! I cannot meet him — I have not strength. You 
do not know ” 

“ I know how well he loved you.” 

“ Hot better than I him ! But I cannot — I dare not. Unless 
I could meet him as we never shall meet upon earth, we must 
be apart forever. For Heaven’s sake promise me never to speak 
my name ! ” 

“ I promise until you release me.” 

“ And you can believe me innocent still, in face of all ? ” 

She stretched her hands to him once more. “I believe. For 
I know what you once were.” 

Great, burning tears fell from his eyes upon her hands as he 
bent over them. 

“God bless you! You were an angel of pity to me in your 
childhood; in your womanhood you give me the only mercy I 
have known since the last day you looked upon my face! We 
shall be far sundered forever. May I come to you once more ? ” 

She paused in hesitation and in thought a while, while for 
the first time in all her years a tremulous tenderness passed 
over her face; she felt an unutterable pity for this man and 
for his doom. Then she drew her hands gently away from him. 

“ Yes, I will see you again.” 

So much concession to such a prayer Venetia Corona had 
never before given. He could not command his voice to answer, 


504 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


but he bowed low before her as before an empress — another 
moment, and she was alone. 

She stood looking out at the wide, level country beyond, with 
the glare of the white, strong light and the red burnous of 
the Branco-Arabs glowing against the blue, but cloudless sky; 
she thought that she must be dreaming some fantastic story 
born of these desert solitudes. 

Yet her eyes were dim with tears, and her heart ached with 
another’s woe. Doubt of him never came to her; but there was 
a vague, terrible pathos in the mystery of his fate that op- 
pressed her with a weight of future evil, unknown, and un- 
measured. 

“ Is he a madman? ” she mused. “ If not, he is a martyr; one 
of the greatest that ever suffered unknown to other men.” 

In the coolness of the late evening, in the court of the cara- 
vanserai, her brother and his friends lounged with her and the 
two ladies of their touring and sketching party, while they 
drank their sherbet, and talked of the Gerome colors of the 
place, and watched the flame of the afterglow burn out, and 
threw millet to the doves and pigeons straying at their feet. 

“My dear Venetia!” cried the Seraph, carelessly tossing 
handfuls of grain to the eager birds, “ I inquired for your 
Sculptor-Chasseur — that fellow Victor — hut I failed to see him, 
for he had been sent on an expedition shortly after I reached 
the camp. They tell me he is a fine soldier; but by what the 
Marquis said, I fear he is but a handsome blackguard, and 
Africa, after all, may be his fittest place.” 

She gave a bend of her head to show she heard him, stroking 
the soft throat of a little dove that had settled on the bench 
beside her. 

“ There is a charming little creature there, a little fire-eater 
— Cigarette, they call her — who is in love with him, I fancy. 
Such a picturesque child! — swears like a trooper, too,” con- 
tinued he who was now Duke of Lyonnesse. “By the way, is 
Berkeley gone ? ” 

“ Left yesterday.” 

“ What for ? — where to ? ” 

“ I was not interested to inquire.” 

“Ah! you never liked him! Odd enough to leave without 
reason or apology ? ” 

“ He had his reasons, doubtless.” 


“ VENETIA.” 505 

“ And made his apology to you ? ” 

“ Oh, yes! ” 

Her brother looked at her earnestly; there was a care upon 
her face new to him. 

“ Are you well, my darling ? ” he asked her. “ Has the sun 
been too hot, or la bise too cold for you ? ” 

She rose, and gathered her cashmeres about her, and smiled 
somewhat wearily her adieu to him. 

“ Both, perhaps. I am tired. Good-night.” 


CHAPTER XXXIII. 


THE GIFT OF THE CR03S. 

One of the most brilliant of Algerian autumnal days shone 
over the great camp in the south. The war was almost at an 
end for a time; the Arabs were defeated and driven desert- 
wards; hostilities irksome, harassing, and annoying, like all 
guerrilla warfare, would long continue; but peace was virtu- 
ally established, and Zaraila had been the chief glory that had 
been added by the campaign to the flag of Imperial France. 
The kites and the vultures had left the bare bones by thou- 
sands to bleach upon the sands, and the hillocks of brown earth 
rose in crowds where those, more cared for in death, had been 
hastily thrust beneath the brown crust of the earth. The dead 
had received their portion of reward — in the jackal’s teeth, in 
the crow’s beak, in the worm’s caress. And the living received 
theirs in this glorious, rose-flecked, glittering autumn morning, 
when the breath of winter made the air crisp and cool, but the 
ardent noon still lighted with its furnace glow the hillside and 
the plain. 

The whole of the Army of the South was drawn up on the 
immense level of the plateau to witness the presentation of the 
Cross of the Legion of Honor. 

It was full noon. The sun shone without a single cloud on 
the deep, sparkling azure of the skies. The troops stretched 
east and west, north and south, formed up in three sides of one 
vast, massive square. The battalions of Zouaves and of 
Zephyrs; the brigade of Chasseurs d’Afrique; the squadrons of 
Spahis; the regiments of Tirailleurs and Turcos; the batteries, 
of Flying Artillery, were all massed there, reassembled from 
the various camps and stations of the southern provinces to do 
honor to the day — to do honor in especial to one by whom the 
glory of the Tricolor had been saved unstained. 

The red, white, and blue of the standards, the brass of the 
eagle guidons; the gray, tossed manes of the chargers; the 
fierce, swarthy faces of the soldiery; the scarlet of the Spahis* 
cloaks, and the snowy folds of the Demi-Cavalerie turbans; 

506 


THE GIFT OF THE CROSS. 


507 

the shine of the sloped lances, and the glisten of the carbine 
barrels, fused together in one sea of blended color, flashed into 
a million prismatic hues against the somber, bister shadow of 
the sunburned plains and the clear blue of the skies. 

It had been a sanguinary, fruitless, cruel campaign; it had 
availed nothing, except to drive the Arabs away from some 
hundred leagues of useless and profitless soil; hundreds of 
French soldiers had fallen by disease, and drought, and dysen- 
tery, as well as by shot and saber, and were unrecorded save 
on the books of the bureaus; unlamented, save, perhaps, in 
some little nestling hamlet among the great, green woods of 
Normandy, or some wooden hut among the olives and the vines, 
of Provence, where some woman, toiling till sunset among the 
fields, or praying before some wayside saint’s stone niche, would 
give a thought to the far-off and devouring desert that had 
drawn down beneath its sands the head that used to lie upon 
her bosom, cradled as a child’s, or caressed as a lover’s. 

But the drums rolled out their long, deep thunder over the 
wastes , and the shot-torn standards fluttered gayly in the 
breeze blowing from the west; and the clear, full music of the 
French bands echoed away to the dim, distant, terrible south, 
where the desert-scorch and the desert-thirst had murdered 
their bravest and best — and the Army was en fete. En fete, 
for it did honor to its darling. Cigarette received the Cross. 

Mounted on her own little, bright bay, fitoile-Filante, with 
tricolor ribbons flying from his bridle and among the glossy 
fringes of his mane, the Little One rode among her Spahis. 
A scarlet kepi was set on her thick, silken curls, a tricolor sash 
was knotted round her waist, her wine-barrel was slung on her 
left hip, her pistols thrust in her ceinturon, and a light carbine 
held in her hand with the butt-end resting on her foot. With 
the sun on her childlike brunette face, her eyes flashing like 
brown diamonds in the light, and her marvelous horsemanship 
showing its skill in a hundred desinvoltures and daring tricks, 
the little Friend of the Flag had come hither among her half- 
savage warriors, whose red robes surrounded her like a sea of 
blood. 

And on a sea of blood she, the Child of War, had floated; 
never sinking in that aw T ful flood, but buoyant ever above its 
darkest waves; catching ever some ray of sunlight upon her 
fair young head, and being oftentimes like a star of hope to 
those over whom its dreaded waters closed. Therefore they 


508 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


loved her, these grim, slaughterous, and lustful warriors, to 
whom no other thing of womanhood was sacred; by whom in 
their wrath or their crime no friend and no brother was spared, 
whose law was license, and whose mercy was murder. They 
loved her, these brutes whose greed was like the tiger’s, whose 
hate was like the devouring flame; and any who should have 
harmed a single lock of her curling hair would have had the 
spears of the African Mussulmans buried by the score in his 
body. They loved her, with the one fond, triumphant love 
these vultures of the army ever knew; and to-day they gloried 
in her with fierce, passionate delight. To-day she was to her 
wild wolves of Africa what Jeanne of Vaucouleurs was to her 
brethren of France. And to-day was the crown of her young 
life. It is given to most, if the desire of their soul ever become 
theirs, to possess it only when long and weary and fainting toil 
has brought them to its goal; when, beholding the golden fruit 
so far off, through so dreary a pilgrimage, dulls its bloom as 
they approach; when having so long centered all their thoughts 
and hopes in the denied possession of that one fair thing, they 
find but little beauty in it when that possession is granted to 
satiate their love. But thrice happy, and few as happy, are 
they to whom the dream of their youth is fulfilled in their 
youth; to whom their ambition comes in full, sweet fruitage, 
while yet the colors of glory have not faded to the young, eager, 
longing eyes that watch its advent. And of these was Cigarette. 

In the fair, slight, girlish body of the child-soldier there 
lived a courage as daring as Danton’s, a patriotism as pure as 
Yergniaud’s, a soul as aspiring as Napoleon’s. Untaught, un- 
tutored, uninspired by poet’s words or patriot’s bidding, 
spontaneous as the rising and the blossoming of some wind- 
sown, sun-fed flower, there was, in this child of the battle and 
the razzia, the spirit of genius, the desire to live and to die 
greatly. It was unreasoned on ; it was felt, not thought ; it was 
often drowned in the gayety of young laughter and the ribaldry 
of military jest; it was often obscured by noxious influence 
and stifled beneath the fumes of lawless pleasure; but there, 
ever, in the soul and the heart of Cigarette, dwelt the germ 
of a pure ambition — the ambition to do some noble thing for 
France, and leave her name upon her soldiers’ lips, a watchword 
and a rally ing-cry for evermore. To be forever a beloved 
tradition in the army of her country, to have her name remem- 
bered in the roll-call as “ Mort sur le champ d’honneur ” ; to 


THE GIFT OF THE CROSS. 


509 


be once shrined in the love and honor of France, Cigarette — full 
of the boundless joys of life that knew no weakness and no 
pain; strong as the young goat, happy as the young lamb, care- 
less as the young flower tossing on the summer breeze — Ciga- 
rette would have died contentedly. And now, living, some 
measure of this desire had been fulfilled to her, some breath 
of this imperishable glory had passed over her. France had 
heard the story of Zaraila; from the Throne a message had 
been passed to her; what was far beyond all else to her, her 
own Army of Africa had crowned her, and thanked her, and 
adored her as with one voice, and wheresoever she passed the 
wild cheers rang through the roar of musketry, as through the 
silence of sunny air, and throughout the regiments every sword 
would have sprung from its scabbard in her defense if she had 
but lifted her hand and said one word — “ Zaraila ! ” 

The Army looked on her with delight now. In all that mute, 
still, immovable mass that stretched out so far, in such 
gorgeous array, there was not one man whose eyes did not turn 
on her, whose pride did not center in her — their Little One, 
who was so wholly theirs, and who had been under the shadow 
of their Flag ever since the curls, so dark now, had been yellow 
as wheat in her infancy. The Flag had been her shelter, her 
guardian, her plaything, her idol; the flutter of the striped 
folds had been the first thing at which her childish eyes had 
laughed; the preservation of its colors from the sacrilege of 
an enemy’s touch had been her religion, a religion whose true 
following was, in her sight, salvation of the worst and the most 
worthless life; and that Flag she had saved and borne aloft in 
victory at Zaraila. There was not one in all those hosts whose 
eyes did not turn on her with gratitude, and reverence, and 
delight in her as their own. 

Not one; except where her own keen, rapid glance, far-seeing 
as the hawk’s, lighted on the squadrons of the Chasseurs 
d’Afrique, and found among their ranks one face, grave, weary, 
meditative, with a gaze that seemed looking far away from the 
glittering scene to a grave that lay unseen leagues beyond, be- 
hind the rocky ridge. 

“ He is thinking of the dead man, not of me,” thought Ciga- 
rette; and the first taint of bitterness entered into her cup of 
joy and triumph, as such bitterness enters into most cups that 
are drunk by human lips. A whole army was thinking of her, 
and of her alone ; and there was a void in her heart, a thorn in 


510 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


her crown, because one among that mighty mass — one only — 
gave her presence little heed, but thought rather of a lonely 
tomb among the desolation of the plains. 

But she had scarce time even for that flash of pain to quiver 
in impotent impatience through her. The trumpets sounded, 
the salvoes of artillery pealed out, the lances and the swords 
were carried up in salute ; on to the ground rode the Marshal of 
France, who represented the imperial will and presence, sur- 
rounded by his staff, by generals of division and brigade, by 
officers of rank, and by some few civilian riders. An aid gal- 
loped up to her where she stood with the corps of her Spahis, 
and gave her his orders. The Little One nodded carelessly, 
and touched Etoile-Filante with the prick of the spur. Like 
lightning the animal bounded forth from the ranks, rearing and 
plunging, and swerving from side to side, while his rider, with 
exquisite grace and address, kept her seat like the little semi- 
Arab that she was, and with a thousand curves and bounds 
cantered down the line of the gathered troops, with the west 
wind blowing from the far-distant sea, and fanning her bright 
cheeks till they wore the soft, scarlet flush of the glowing ja- 
ponica flower. And all down the ranks a low, hoarse, strange, 
longing murmur went — the buzz of the voices which, but that 
discipline suppressed them, would have broken out in worship- 
ing acclamations. 

As carelessly as though she reined up before the Cafe door 
of the As de Pique, she arrested her horse before the great 
Marshal who was the impersonation of authority, and put her 
hand up in the salute, with her saucy, wayward laugh. He was 
the impersonation of that vast, silent, awful, irresponsible 
power which, under the name of the Second Empire, stretched 
its hand of iron across the sea, and forced the soldiers of 
France down into nameless graves, with the desert sand choking 
their mouths; but he was no more to Cigarette than any 
drummer-boy that might be present. She had all the contempt 
for the laws of rank of your thorough inborn democrat, all the 
gay, insouciant indifference to station of the really free and 
untrammeled nature; and, in her sight, a dying soldier, lying 
quietly in a ditch to perish of shot-wounds without a word or a 
moan, was greater than all MM. les Marechaux glittering in their 
stars and orders. As for impressing her, or hoping to impress 
her, with rank — pooh ! You might as well have bid the sailing 
clouds pause in their floating passage because they came be- 



Photo by Byron 







1 * 


THE GIFT OF THE CROSS. 511 

tween royalty and the sun. All the sovereigns of Europe would 
have awed Cigarette not one whit more than a gathering of 
muleteers. “ Allied sovereigns — bah ! ” she would have said, 
“ what did that mean in ’15 ? A chorus of magpies chattering 
over one stricken eagle ! ” 

So she reined up before the Marshal and his staff, and the 
few great personages whom Algeria could bring around them, 
as indifferently as she had many a time reined up before a knot 
of grim Turcos, smoking under a barrack-gate. He was noth- 
ing to her : it was her army that crowned her. “ The Generalis- 
simo is the poppy-head, the men are the wheat ; lay every ear of 
the wheat low, and of what use is the towering poppy that blazed 
so grand in the sun ? ” Cigarette would say with metaphorical 
unction, forgetful, like most allegorists, that her fable was one- 
sided and unjust in figure and deduction. 

Nevertheless, despite her gay contempt for rank, her heart 
beat fast under its gold-laced packet as she reined up fitoile 
and saluted. In that hot, clear sun all the eyes of that im- 
mense host were fastened on her, and the hour of her longing 
desire was come at last. France had recognized that she had 
done greatly, and France, through the voice of this, its chief, 
spoke to her — France, her beloved, and her guiding-star, for 
whose sake the young, brave soul within her would have dared 
and have endured all things. There was a group before her, 
large and brilliant, but at them Cigarette never looked; what 
she saw were the sunburned faces of her “ children,” of men 
who, in the majority, were old enough to be her grandsires, who 
had been with her through so many darksome hours, and whose 
black and rugged features lightened and grew tender whenever 
they looked upon their Little One. For the moment she felt 
giddy with sweet, fiery joy; they were here to behold her 
thanked in the name of France. 

The Marshal, in advance of all his staff, doffed his plumed 
hat and bowed to his saddle-bow as he faced her. He knew her 
well by sight, this pretty child of his Army of Africa, who had, 
before then, suppressed mutiny like a veteran, and led the 
charge like a Murat — this kitten with a lion’s heart, this hum- 
ming-bird with an eagle’s swoop. 

“ Mademoiselle,” he commenced, while his voice, well skilled 
to such work, echoed to the farthest end of the long lines of 
troops, “ I have the honor to discharge to-day the happiest , duty 
of my life. In conveying to you the expression of the Em- 


512 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


peror’s approval of your noble conduct in the present campaign, 
I express the sentiments of the whole Army. Your action on 
the day of Zaraila was as brilliant in conception as it was great 
in execution; and the courage you displayed was only equaled 
by your patriotism. May the soldiers of many wars remember 
and emulate you. In the name of France, I thank you. In the 
name of the Emperor, I bring to you the Cross of the Legion 
of Honor.” 

As the brief and soldierly words rolled down the ranks of 
the listening regiments, he stooped forward from his saddle and 
fastened the red ribbon on her breast; while from the whole 
gathered mass, watching, hearing, waiting breathlessly to give 
their tribute of applause to their darling also, a great shout 
rose as with one voice, strong, full, echoing over and over again 
across the plains in thunder that joined her name with the 
name of France and of Napoleon, and hurled it upward in 
fierce, tumultuous, idolatrous love to those cruel, cloudless skies 
that shone above the dead. She was their child, their treasure, 
their idol, their young leader in war, their young angel in suf- 
fering; she was all their own, knowing with them one common 
mother — France. Honor to her was honor to them; they gloried 
with heart and soul in this bright, young, fearless life that had 
been among them ever since her infant feet had waded through 
the blood of slaughter-fields, and her infant lips had laughed to 
see the tricolor float in the sun above the smoke of battle. 

And as she heard, her face became very pale, her large eyes 
grew dim and very soft, her mirthful mouth trembled with the 
pain of a too intense joy. She lifted her head, and all the un- 
utterable love she bore her country and her people thrilled 
through the music of her voice. 

“ Frangais ! — ce n’etait rien ! ” 

That was all she said ; in that one first word of their common 
nationality she spoke alike to the Marshal of the Empire and 
to the conscript of the ranks. “Frangais!” That one title 
made them all equal in her sight; whoever claimed it was hon- 
ored in her eyes, and was precious to her heart, and when she 
answered them that it was nothing, this thing which they glori- 
fied in her, she answered but what seemed the simple truth in 
her code. She would have thought it “ nothing ” to have per- 
ished by shot, or steel, or flame, in day-long torture for that one 
fair sake of France. 

Vain in all else, and to all else wayward, here she was docile 


THE GIFT OF THE CROSS. 


513 


and submissive as the most patient child; here she deemed the 
greatest and the hardest thing that she could ever do far less 
than all that she would willingly have done. And as she looked 
upon the host whose thousand and ten thousand voices rang 
up to the noonday sun in her homage, and in hers alone, a light 
like a glory beamed upon her face that for once was white and 
still and very grave — none who saw her face then ever forgot 
that look. 

In that moment she touched the full sweetness of a proud t 
and pure ambition, attained and possessed in all its intensity, 
in all its perfect splendor. In that moment she knew that 
divine hour which, born of a people’s love and of the impossible 
desires of genius in its youth, comes to so few human lives — 
knew that which was known to the young Napoleon when, in 
the hot hush of the nights of July, France welcomed the Con- 
queror of Italy. And in that moment there was an intense 
stillness ; the Army crowned as its bravest and its best a woman- 
child in the springtime of her girlhood. 

Then Cigarette laid her hand on the Cross that had been 
the dream of her years since she had first seen the brazen 
glisten of the eagles above her wondering eyes of infancy, and 
loosened it from above her heart, and stretched her hand out 
with it to the great Chief. 

“ M. le Marechal, this is not for me.” 

“ Not for you ! The Emperor bestows it ” 

Cigarette saluted with her left hand, still stretching to him 
the decoration with the other. 

“ It is not for me — not while I wear it unjustly.” 

“Unjustly! What is your meaning? My child, you talk 
strangely. The gifts of the Empire are not given lightly.” 

“No; and they shall not be given unfairly. Listen.” The 
color had flushed back, bright and radiant, to her cheeks; her 
eyes glanced with their old daring; her contemptuous, careless 
eloquence returned, and her voice echoed, every note distinct as 
the notes of a trumpet-call, down the ranks of the listening 
soldiery. “Hark you! The Emperor sends me this Cross; 
France thanks me; the Army applauds me. Well, I thank them, 
one and all. Cigarette was never yet ungrateful ; it is the sin of 
the coward. But I say I will not take what is unjustly mine, 
and this preference to me is unjust. I saved the day at Zaraila ? 
Oh, he! grande chose ga! And how? — by scampering fast on 
my mare, and asking for a squadron or two of my Spahis — that 


514 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


was all. If I had not done so much — I, a soldier of Africa — 
why, I should have deserved to have been shot like a cat — bah! 
should I not ? It was not I who saved the battle. Who was it ? 
It was a Chasseur d’Afrique, I tell you. What did he do? 
Why, this. When his officers were all gone down, he rallied, 
and gathered his handful of men, and held the ground with 
them all through the day — two — four — six — eight — ten hours 
in the scorch of the sun. The Arbicos, even, were forced to see 
that was grand ; they offered him life if he would yield. All his 
answer was to form his few horsemen into line as well as he 
could for the slain, and charge — a last charge in which he knew 
not one of his troop could live through the swarms of the Arbis 
around them. That I saw with my own eyes. I and my Spahis 
just reached him in time. Then who is it that saved the day, 
I pray you ? — I, who just ran a race for fun and came in at the 
fag-end of the thing, or this man who lived the whole day 
through in the carnage, and never let go of the guidon, but only 
thought how to die greatly? I tell you, the Cross is his, and 
not mine. Take it back, and give it where it is due.” 

The Marshal listened, half amazed, half amused — half pre- 
pared to resent the insult to the Empire and to discipline, half 
disposed to award that submission to her caprice which all 
Algeria gave to Cigarette. 

“ Mademoiselle,” he said, with a grave smile, “ the honors of 
the Empire are not to be treated thus. But who is this man 
for whom you claim so much ? ” 

“Who is he?” echoed Cigarette, with all her fiery disdain 
for authority ablaze once more like brandy in a flame. “ Oh, 
he! Napoleon Premier would not have left his Marshals to 
ask that ! He is the finest soldier in Africa, if it be possible for 
one to be finer than another where all are so great. They know 
that; they pick him out for all the dangerous missions. But 
the Black Hawk hates him, and so France never hears the truth 
of all that he does. I tell you, if the Emperor had seen him 
as I saw him on the field of Zaraila, his would have been the 
Cross, and not mine.” 

“You are generous, my Little One.” 

“No; I am just.” 

Her brave eyes glowed in the sun, her voice rang as clear as 
a bell. She raised her head proudly and glanced down the line 
of her army. She was just — that was the one virtue in Ciga- 
rette’s creed without which you were poltroon, or liar, or both. 


THE GIFT OF THE CROSS. 


515 


She alone knew what neglect, what indifference, what unin- 
tentional, but none the less piercing, insults she had to avenge; 
she alone knew of that pain with which she had heard the name 
of her patrician rival murmured in delirious slumber after 
Zaraila; she alone knew of that negligent caress of farewell 
with which her lips had been touched as lightly as his hand 
caressed a horse’s neck or a bird’s wing. But these did not 
weigh with her one instant to make her withhold the words 
that she deemed deserved; these did not balance against him 
one instant the pique and the pain of her own heart, in oppo- 
sition to the due of his courage and his fortitude. 

Cigarette was rightly proud of her immunity from the weak- 
nesses of her sex; she had neither meanness nor selfishness. 

The Marshal listened gravely, the groups around him smil- 
ingly. If it had been any other than the Little One, it would 
have been very different; as it was, all France and all Algeria 
knew Cigarette. 

“ What may be the name of this man whom you praise so 
greatly, my pretty one ? ” he asked her. 

“ That I cannot tell, M. le Marechal. All I know is he calls 
himself here Louis Victor.” 

“ Ah ! I have heard much of him. A fine soldier, but ” 

“ A fine soldier without a ‘ but,’ ” interrupted Cigarette, with 
rebellious indifference to the rank of the great man she cor- 
rected, “ unless you add, ‘ but never done justice by his Chief.’ ” 

As she spoke, her eyes for the first time glanced over the 
various personages who were mingled among the staff of the 
Marshal, his invited guests for the review upon the plains. 
The color burned more duskily in her cheek, her eyes glittered 
with hate; she could have bitten her little, frank, witty tongue 
through and through for having spoken the name of that Chas- 
seur who was yonder, out of earshot, where the lance-heads of 
his squadrons glistened against the blue skies. She saw a face 
which, though seen but once before, she knew instantly again — 
the face of “ Miladi.” And she saw it change color, and lose its 
beautiful hue, and grow grave and troubled as the last words 
passed between herself and the French Marshal. 

“ Ah ! can she feel ! ” wondered Cigarette, who, with a com- 
mon error of such vehement young democrats as 1 herself, always 
thought that hearts never ached in the Patrician Order, and 
thought so still when she saw the listless, proud tranquillity 
return, not again to be altered, over the perfect features that 


516 


UNDEE TWO FLAGS. 


she watched with so much violent, instinctive hate. “ Did she 
heed his name, or did she not? What are their faces in that 
Order ? Only alabaster masks ! ” mused the child. And her 
heart sank, and bitterness mingled with her joy, and the soul 
that had a moment before been so full of all pure and noble 
emotion, all high and patriotic and idealic thought, was dulled 
and soiled and clogged with baser passions. So ever do un- 
worthy things drag the loftier nature earthward. 

She scarcely heard the Marshal’s voice as it addressed her 
with a kindly indulgence, as to a valued soldier and a spoiled 
pet in one. 

“Have no fear, Little One. Victor’s claims are not for- 
gotten, though we may await our own time to investigate and 
reward them. No one ever served the Empire and remained un- 
rewarded. For yourself, wear your Cross proudly. It glitters 
above not only the bravest, but the most generous, heart in 
the service.” 

None had ever won such warm words from the redoubted 
chief, whose speech was commonly rapid and stern as his con- 
duct of war, and who usually recompensed his men for fine 
service rather with a barrel of brandy to season their rations 
than with speeches of military eulogium. But it failed to give 
delight to Cigarette. She felt resting upon her the calm gaze 
of those brilliant azure eyes; and she felt, as she had done 
once in her rhododendron shelter, as though she were some 
very worthless, rough, rude, untaught, and coarse little bar- 
barian, who was, at best, but fit for a soldier’s jest and a soldier’s 
riot in the wild license of the barrack room or the campaigning 
tent. It was only the eyes of this woman, whom he loved, which 
ever had power to awaken that humiliation, that impatience 
of herself, that consciousness of something lost and irrevocable, 
which moved her now. 

Cigarette was proud with an intense pride of all her fiery 
liberty from every feminine trammel, of all her complete im- 
munity from every scruple and every fastidiousness of her sex. 
But, for once, within sight of that noble and haughty beauty, 
a poignant, cruel, wounding sense of utter inferiority, of utter 
debasement, possessed and weighed down her lawless and in- 
domitable spirit. Some vague, weary feeling that her youth 
was fair enough in the sight of men, but that her older years 
would be very dark, very terrible, came on her even in this hour 
of the supreme joy, the supreme triumph, of her life. Even 















Photo by Sarony 






THE GIFT OF THE CROSS. 


517 


her buoyant and cloudless nature did not escape that mortal 
doom which pursues and poisons every ambition in the very 
instant of its full fruition. 

The doubt, the pain, the self -mistrust were still upon her as 
she saluted once again and paced down the ranks of the as- 
sembled divisions; while every lance was carried, every sword 
lifted, every bayonet presented to the order, “ Portez vos 
armes ! ” as she went ; greeted as though she were an empress, 
for that cross which glittered on her heart, for that courage 
wherewith she had saved the Tricolor. 

The great shouts rent the air; the clash of the lowered arms 
saluted her; the drums rolled out upon the air; the bands of 
the regiments of Africa broke into the fiery rapture of a war- 
march; the folds of the battle-torn flags were flung out wider 
and wider on the breeze. Gray-bearded men gazed on her with 
tears of delight upon their grizzled lashes, and young boys 
looked at her as the children of France once gazed upon J^mne 
d’Arc, where Cigarette, with the red ribbon on her breast, rode 
slowly in the noonday light along the line of troops. 

It was the paradise of which she had dreamed; it was the 
homage of the army she adored; it was one of those hours in 
which life is transfigured, exalted, sublimated into a divine 
glory by the pure love of a people; and yet in that instant, so 
long, so passionately desired, the doom of all genius was hers. 
There was the stealing pain of a weary unrest amid the sunlit 
and intoxicating joy of satisfied aspiration. 

The eyes of Venetia Corona followed her with something of 
ineffable pity. “Poor little unsexed child !” she thought. 
“ How pretty and how brave she is ! and — how true to him ! ” 

The Seraph, beside her in the group around the flagstaff, 
smiled and turned to her. 

“ I said that little Amazon was in love with this fellow 
Victor; how loyally she stood up for him. But I dare say she 
would be as quick to send a bullet through him, if he should 
ever displease her.” 

“ Why ? Where there is so much courage there inust be much 
nobility, even in the abandonment of such a life as hers.” 

“ Ah, you do not know what half-French, half- African na- 
tures are. She would die for him just now very likely; but if 
he ever forsake her, she will be quite as likely to run her dirk 
through him.” 

“Forsake her! What is he to her?” 


518 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


There was a certain impatience in the tone, and something 
of contemptuous disbelief, that made her brother look at her 
in wonder. 

“ What on earth can the loves of a camp concern her ? ” he 
thought, as he answered: “Nothing that I know of. But this 
charming little tigress is very fond of him. By the way, can 
you point the man out to me ? I am curious to see him.” 

“ Impossible ! There are ten thousand faces, and the cavalry 
squadrons are so far off.” 

She spoke with indifference, but she grew a little pale as she 
did so, and the eyes that had always met his so frankly, so 
proudly, were turned from him. He saw it, and it troubled 
him with a trouble the more perplexed that he could assign to 
himself no reason for it. That it could be caused by any inter- 
est felt for a Chasseur d’Afrique by the haughtiest lady in all 
Europe would have been too preposterous and too insulting a 
supposition for it ever to occur to him. And he did not dream 
the truth — the truth that it was her withholding, for the first 
time in all her life, any secret from him which caused her 
pain; that it was the fear lest he should learn that his lost 
friend was living thus which haunted her with that unspoken 
anxiety. 

They were traveling here with the avowed purpose of seeing 
the military operations of the south; she could not have pre- 
vented him from accepting the Marshal’s invitation to the 
review of the African Army without exciting comment and 
interrogation; she was forced to let events take their own 
course, and shape themselves as they would; yet an appre- 
hension, a dread, that she could hardly form into distant shape, 
pursued her. It weighed on her with an infinite oppression — 
this story which she alone had had revealed to her; this life 
whose martyrdom she alone had seen, and whose secret even she 
could not divine. It affected her more powerfully, it grieved 
her more keenly, than she herself knew. It brought her close, 
for the only time in her experience, to a life absolutely without 
a hope, and one that accepted the despair of such a destiny with 
silent resignation; it moved her as nothing less, as nothing 
feebler or of more common type, could ever have found power 
to do. There were a simplicity and a greatness in the mute, 
unpretentious, almost unconscious, heroism of this man, who, 
for the sheer sake of that which he deemed the need of “ honor,” 
accepted the desolation of his entire futire ^bich attracted her 


THE GIFT OF THE CROSS. 


519 


as nothing else had ever done, which made her heart ache when 
she looked at the glitter of the Franco- Arab squadrons, where 
their sloped lances glistened in the sun, with a pang that she 
had never felt before. Moreover, as the untutored, half- 
barbaric, impulsive young heart of Cigarette had felt, so felt 
the high-bred, cultured, world-wise mind of Venetia Corona — 
that this man’s exile was no shame, but some great sacrifice; 
a sacrifice whose bitterness smote her with its own suffering, 
whose mystery wearied her with its own perplexity, as she gazed 
down the line of the regiments to where the shot-bruised Eagle 
of Zaraila gleamed above the squadrons of the Chasseurs 
d’Afrique. 

He, in his place among those squadrons, knew her, though 
so far distant, and endured the deadliest trial of patience which 
had come to him while beneath the yoke of African discipline. 
To leave his place was to incur the heaviest punishment; yet 
he could almost have risked that sentence rather than wait 
there. Only seven days had gone by since he had been with 
her under the roof of the caravanserai; but it seemed to him 
as if these days had aged him more than all the twelve years 
that he had passed upon the Algerian soil. He was thankful 
that the enmity of his relentless chief had placed such shadow 
of evil report between his name and the rewards due to his 
service, that even the promised recognition of his brilliant 
actions at Zaraila and elsewhere was postponed a while on the 
plea of investigation. He was thankful that the honors which 
the whole Army expected for him, and which the antagonism 
of Chateauroy would soon be powerless to avert any longer from 
their meet bestowal, did not force him to go up there in the 
scorching light of the noon, and take those honors as a soldier 
of France, under the eyes of the man he loved, of the woman 
he adored. 

As it was, he sat motionless as a statue in his saddle, and 
never looked westward to where the tricolors of the flag-staff 
drooped above the head of Venetia Corona. 

Thus, he never heard the gallant words spoken in his behalf 
by the loyal lips that he had not cared to caress. As she passed 
down the ranks, indeed, he saw and smiled on his little cham- 
pion; but the smile had only a weary kindness of recognition 
in it, and it wounded Cigarette more than though he had 
struck her through the breast with his lance. 

The moment that he dreaded came; the troops broke up and 


520 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


marched past the representative of their empire, the cavalry 
at the head of the divisions. He passed among the rest; he 
raised his lance so that it hid his features as much as its slender 
shaft could do; the fair and noble face on which his glance 
flashed was very pale and very grave; the one beside her was 
sunny and frank, and unchanged by the years that had drifted 
by. and its azure eyes, so like her own, sweeping over the masses 
with all the swift, keen appreciation of a military glance, were 
so eagerly noting carriage, accouterment, harness, horses, that 
they never once fell upon the single soldier whose heart so un- 
utterably longed for, even while it dreaded, his recognition. 

Venetia gave a low, quick breath of mingled pain and relief 
as the last of the Chasseurs paced by. The Seraph started, 
and turned his head. 

“ My darling ! Are you not well ? ” 

“ Perfectly ! ” 

“You do not look so; and you forgot now to point me out 
this special trooper. I forgot him too.” 

“He goes there — the tenth from here.” 

Her brother looked ; it was too late. 

“ He is taller than the others. That is all I can see now 
that his back is turned. I will seek him out when ” 

“ Do no such thing ! ” 

“ And why ? It was your own request that I inquired ” 

“ Think me changeable as you will. Do nothing to seek him, 
to inquire for him ” 

“ But why? A man who at Zaraila ” 

“ Never mind ! Do not let it be said you notice a Chasseur 
d’Afrique at my instance.” 

The color flushed her face as she spoke; it was with the 
scorn, the hatred, of this shadow of an untruth with which she 
for the sole time in life soiled her lips. He, noting it, shook 
himself restlessly in his saddle. If he had not known her to be 
the noblest and the haughtiest of all the imperial women who 
had crowned his house with their beauty and their honor, he 
could have believed that some interest, degrading as disgrace, 
moved her toward this foreign trooper, and caused her altered 
wishes and her silence. As it was, so much insult to her as 
would have existed in the mere thought was impossible to him; 
yet it left him annoyed and vaguely disquieted. 

The subject did not wholly fade from his mind throughout 
the entertainments that succeeded to the military inspection. 


THE GIFT OF THE CROSS. 


521 


in the great white tent glistening with gilded bees and bright- 
ened with tricolor standards which the ingenuity of the soldiers 
of the administration had reared as though by magic amid the 
barrenness of the country, and in which the skill of camp cooks 
served up a delicate banquet. The scene was very picturesque, 
and all the more so for the widespread, changing panorama 
without of the canvas city of the camp. It was chiefly designed 
to pleasure the great lady who had come so far southward; all 
the resources which could be employed were exhausted to make 
the occasion memorable and worthy of the dignity of the guests 
whom the Viceroy of the Empire delighted to honor. Yet she, 
seated there on his right hand, where the rich skins and cash- 
meres and carpets were strewn on a dais, saw in reality little 
save a confused blending of hues, and metals, and orders, and 
weapons, and snowy beards, and olive faces, and French ele- 
gance and glitter fused with the grave majesty of Arab pomp. 
For her thoughts were not with the scene around her, but with 
the soldier who was without in that teeming crowd of tents, 
who lived in poverty, and danger, and the hard slavery of un- 
questioning obedience, and asked only to be as one dead to 
all who had known and loved him in his youth. It was in vain 
that she repelled the memory; it usurped her, and would not 
be displaced. 

Meantime, in another part of the camp, the heroine of Zaraila 
was feasted, not less distinctively, if more noisily and more 
familiarly, by the younger officers of the various regiments. 
La Cigarette, many a time before the reigning spirit of suppers 
and carouses, was banqueted with all the eclat that befitted that 
( ross which sparkled on her blue and scarlet vest. High throned 
on a pyramid of knapsacks, canteens, and rugs, toasted a thou- 
sand times in all brandies and red wines that the stores would 
yield, sung of in improvised odes that were chanted by voices 
which might have won European fame as tenor or as basso, 
caressed and sued with all the rapid, fiery, lightly-come and 
lightly-go love of the camp, with twice a hundred flashing, 
darkling eyes bent on her in the hot admiration that her vain, 
coquette spirit found delight in, ruling as she would with jest, 
and caprice, and command, and bravado all these men who were 
terrible as tigers to their foes, the Little One reigned alone; and 
— like many who have reigned before her — found lead in her 
scepter, dross in her diadem, satiety in her kingdom. 

When it was over, this banquet that was all in her honor, and 


522 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


that three months before would have been a paradise to her, 
she shook herself free of the scores of arms outstretched to 
keep her captive, and went out into the night alone. She did 
not know what she ailed, but she was restless, oppressed, 
weighed down with a sense of dissatisfied weariness that had 
never before touched the joyous and elastic nature of the child 
of France. 

And this, too, in the moment when the very sweetest and 
loftiest of her ambitions was attained! when her hand wan- 
dered to that decoration on her heart which had been ever in 
her sight what the crown of wild olive and the wreath of 
summer grasses were to the youths and to the victors of the old, 
dead classic years! As she stood in solitude under the bril- 
liancy of the stars, tears, unfamiliar and unbidden, rose in her 
eyes as they gazed over the hosts around her. 

“ How they live only for the slaughter ! how they perish like 
the beasts of the field ! ” she thought. Upon her, as on the poet 
or the patriot who could translate and could utter the thought 
as she could not, there weighed the burden of that heart-sick 
consciousness of the vanity of the highest hope, the futility of 
the noblest effort, to bring light into the darkness of the suffer- 
ing, toiling, blind throngs of human life. 

“There is only one thing worth doing — to die greatly!” 
thought the aching heart of the child-soldier, unconsciously 
returning to the only end that the genius and the greatness of 
Greece could find as issue to the terrible jest, the mysterious 
despair, of all existence. 


CHAPTER XXXIV. 


THE DESERT HAWK AND THE PARADISE-BIRD. 

Some way distant, parted by a broad strip of unoccupied 
ground from the camp, were the grand marquees set aside for 
the Marshal and for his guests. They were twelve in number, 
gayly decorated — as far as decoration could be obtained in the 
southern provinces of Algeria — and had, Arab-like, in front of 
each the standard of the Tricolor. Before one were two other 
standards also: the flags of England and of Spain. Cigarette, 
looking on from afar, saw the alien colors wave in the torch- 
light flickering on them. “ That is hers,” thought the Little 
One, with the mournful and noble emotions of the previous 
moments swiftly changing into the violent, reasonless, tumultu- 
ous hatred at once of a rival and of an Order. 

Cigarette was a thorough democrat; when she was two years 
old she had sat on the topmost pile of a Parisian barricade, 
with the red bonnet on her curls, and had clapped her tiny 
hands for delight when the bullets flew, and the “ Marseillaise ” 
rose above the cannonading; and the spirit of the musketry 
and of the “ Marseillaise ” had together passed into her and 
made her what she was. She was a genuine democrat; and 
nothing short of the pure isonomy of the Greeks was tolerated 
(n her political philosophy, though she could not have told what 
such a word had meant for her life. She had all the furious 
prejudices and all the instinctive truths in her of an uncom- 
promising Rouge; and the sight alone of those lofty standards, 
signalizing the place of rest of the “ aristocrats,” while her 
“ children’s ” lowly tents wore in her sight all the dignity and 
all the distinction of the true field, would have aroused her ire 
at any time. But now a hate tenfold keener moved her; she 
had a jealousy of the one in- whose honor those two foreign 
ensigns floated, that was the most bitter thing which had ever 
entered her short and sunny life — a hate the hotter because 
tinged with that sickening . sense of self-humiliation, because 
mingled with that wondering emotion at beholding something so 
utterly unlike to all that she had known or dreamed. 


524 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


She had it in her, could she have had the power, to merci- 
lessly and brutally destroy this woman’s beauty, which was so 
far above her reach, as she had once destroyed the ivory wreath ; 
yet, as that of the snow-white carving had done, so did this 
fair and regal beauty touch her, even in the midst of her fury, 
with a certain reverent awe, with a certain dim sense of some- 
thing her own life had missed. She had trodden the ivory in 
pieces with all the violence of childish, savage, uncalculating 
hate, and she had been chidden, as by a rebuking voice, by the 
wreck which her action had made at her feet ; so could she now, 
had it been possible, have ruined and annihilated the loveli- 
ness that filled his heart and his soul; but so would she also, 
the moment her instinct to avenge herself had been sated, have 
felt the remorse and the shame of having struck down a deli- 
cate and gracious thing that even in its destruction had a glory 
that was above her. 

Even her very hate attracted her to the sight, to the study, 
to the presence of this woman, who was as dissimilar to all of 
womanhood that had ever crossed her path, in camp and bar- 
rack, as the pure, white, gleaming lily of the hothouse is unlike 
the wind-tossed, sand-stained, yellow leaf down-trodden in the 
mud. An irresistible fascination drew her toward the self-same 
pain which had so wounded her a few hours before — an impulse 
more intense than curiosity, and more vital than caprice, urged 
her to the vicinity of the only human being who had ever awak- 
ened in her the pang of humiliation, the throbs of envy. 

And she went to that vicinity, now that the daylight had 
just changed to evening, and the ruddy torch-glare was glow- 
ing everywhere from great pine boughs thrust in the ground, 
with their resinous branches steeped in oil and flaring alight. 
There was not a man that night in camp who would have dared 
oppose the steps of the young heroine of the Cross wherever 
they might choose, in their fantastic flight, to wander. The 
sentinels passing up and down the great space before the 
marquees challenged her, indeed, but she was quick to give the 
answering password, and they let her go by them, their eyes 
turning after the little picturesque form that every soldier of 
the Corps of Africa loved almost like the flag beneath which 
he fought. Once in the magic circle, she paused a while; the 
desire that urged her on, and the hate that impelled her back- 
ward, keeping her rooted there in the dusky shadow which the 
flapping standards threw. 


THE DESERT HAWK AND THE PARADISE-BIRD. 525 


To creep covertly into her rival’s presence, to hide herself 
like a spy to see what she wished, to show fear, or hesitation, 
or deference, were not in the least what she contemplated. 
What she intended was to confront this fair, strange, cold, 
cruel thing, and see if she were of flesh and blood like other 
living beings, and do the best that could be done to outrage, 
to scourge, to challenge, to deride her with all the insolent 
artillery of camp ribaldry, and show her how a child of the 
people could laugh at her rank, and affront her purity, and 
scorn her power. Definite idea there was none in her; she had 
come on impulse. But a vague longing in some way to break 
down that proud serenity which galled her so sharply, and 
bring hot blood of shame into that delicate face, and cast indig- 
nity on that imperious and unassailable pride, consumed her. 

She longed to do as some girl of whom she had once been 
told by an old Invalide had done in the ’89 — a girl of the people, 
a fisher-girl of the Cannebiere, who had loved one above her 
rank, a noble who deserted her for a woman of his own Order, 
a beautiful, soft-skinned, lily-like, scornful aristocrat, with the 
silver ring of merciless laughter and the languid luster of 
sweet, contemptuous eyes. The Marseillaise bore her wrong 
in silence — she was a daughter of the south and of the populace, 
with a dark, brooding, burning beauty, strong and fierce, and 
braced with the salt lashing of the sea and with the keen breath 
of the stormy mistral. She held her peace while the great lady 
was wooed and won, while the marriage joys came with the 
purple vintage time, while the people were made drunk at the 
bridal of their chatelaine in those hot, ruddy, luscious autumn 
k days. 

She held her peace; and the Terror came, and the streets of 
the city by the sea ran blood, and the scorch of the sun blazed, 
every noon, on the scaffold. Then she had her vengeance. She 
stood and saw the ax fall down on the proud, snow-white neck 
that never had bent till it bent there, and she drew the severed 
head into her own bronzed hands and smote the lips his lips 
had kissed, — a cruel blow that blurred their beauty out, — and 
twined a fish-hook in the long and glistening hair, and drew it, 
laughing as she went, through dust, and mire, and gore, and 
over the rough stones of the town, and through the shouting 
crowds of the multitudes, and tossed it out on to the sea, laugh- 
ing still as the waves flung it out from billow to billow, and the 
fish sucked it down to make their feast. “Voila tes secondes 


526 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


noces ! ” she cried where she stood, and laughed by the side of 
the gray, angry water, watching the tresses of the floating hair 
sink downward like a heap of sea-tossed weed. 

That horrible story came to the memory of Cigarette now 
as it had been told her by the old soldier who, in his boyhood, 
had seen the entry of the Marseillais to Paris. She knew what 
the woman of the people had felt when she had bruised and 
mocked and thrown out to the devouring waters that fair and 
fallen head. 

“ I could do it — I could do it,” she thought, with the savage 
instinct of her many-sided nature dominant, leaving uppermost 
only its ferocity — the same ferocity as had moved the southern 
woman to wreak her hatred on the senseless head of her rival. 
The school in which the child-soldier had been reared had been 
one to foster all those barbaric impulses; to leave in their in- 
born, uncontrolled force all those native desires which the 
human shares with the animal nature. There had been no 
more to teach her that these were criminal or forbidden than 
there is to teach the young tigress that it is cruel to tear the 
antelope for food. What Cigarette was, that nature had made 
her; she was no more trained to self-control, or to the knowl- 
edge of good, than is the tiger’s cub as it wantons in its play 
under the great, broad tropic leaves. 

Now, she acted on her impulse; her impulse of open scorn 
of rank, of reckless vindication of her right to do just whatso- 
ever pleasured her; and she went boldly forward and dashed 
aside, with no gentle hand, the folds that hung before the en- 
trance of the tent, and stood there with the gleam of the starry 
night and the glow of the torches behind her, so that her pic- 
turesque and brightly colored form looked painted on a dusky, 
lurid background of shadow and of flame. 

The action startled the occupants of the tent, and made them 
both look up; they were Yenetia Corona and a Levantine 
woman, who was her favorite and most devoted attendant, and 
had been about her from her birth. The tent was the first 
of three set aside for her occupance, and had been adorned 
with as much luxury as was procurable, and with many of the 
rich and curious things of Algerian art and workmanship, so 
far as they could be hastily collected by the skill and quickness 
of the French intendance. Cigarette stood silently looking 
at the scene on which she had thus broken without leave or 
question; she saw nothing of it except one head lifted in sur- 


THE DESERT HAWK AND THE PARADISE-BIRD. 527 


prise at her entrance — just such a head, just so proudly car- 
ried, just so crowned with gleaming hair as that which the Mar- 
seillaise had dragged through the dust of the streets and cast 
out to the lust of the sharks. Venetia hesitated a moment in 
astonished wonder ; then, with the grace and the courtesy of her 
race, rose and approached the entrance of her tent, in which that 
figure — half a soldier, half a child — was standing, with the 
fitful, reddened light behind. She recognized whose it was. 

“ Is it you, ma petite ? ” she said kindly. “ Come within. Do 
not be afraid ” 

She spoke with the gentle consideration of a great lady to 
one whom she admired for her heroism, compassionated for her 
position, and thought naturally in need of such encouragement. 
She had liked the frank, fearless, ardent brunette face of the 
Little Friend of the Flag; she had liked her fiery and indomita- 
ble defense of the soldier of Zaraila; she felt an interest in her 
as deep as her pity, and she was above the scruples which many 
women of her rank might have had as to the fitness of entering 
into conversation with this child of the army. She was gentle 
to her as to a young bird, a young kitten, a young colt; what 
her brother had said of the vivandiere’s love for one whom the 
girl only knew as a trooper of Chasseurs filled with an indefina- 
ble compassion the woman who knew him as her own equal 
and of her own Order. 

Cigarette, for once, answered nothing; her eyes very lower- 
ing, burning, savage. 

“You wish to see me?” Venetia asked once more. “Come 
nearer. Have no fear ” 

The one word unloosed the spell which had kept Cigarette 
speechless; the one word was an insult beyond endurance, that 
lashed all the worst spirit in her into flame. 

“ Fear ! ” she cried, with a camp oath, whose blasphemy was 
happily unintelligible to her listener. “Fear! You think I 
fear you ! — the darling of the army, who saved the squadron at 
Zaraila, who has seen a thousand days of bloodshed, who has 
killed as many men with her own hand as any Lascar among 
them all — fear you, you hothouse flower, you paradise-bird, you 
silver pheasant, who never did aught but spread your dainty 
colors in the sun, and never earned so much as the right to eat 
a piece of black bread, if you had your deserts! Fear you — I! 
Why ! do you not know that I could kill you where you stand as 
easily as I could wring the neck of any one of those gold- 


528 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


winged orioles that flew above your head to-day, and who have 
more right to live than you, for they do at least labor in their 
own fashion for their food, and their drink, and their dwelling ? 
Dieu de Dieu! Why, I have killed Arabs, I tell you — great, 
gaunt, grim men — and made them bite the dust under my fire. 
Do you think I would check for a moment at dealing you death, 
you beautiful, useless, honeyed, poisoned, painted exotic, that 
has every wind tempered to you, and thinks the world only 
made to bear the fall of your foot ! ” 

The fury of words was poured out without pause, and with 
an intense passion vibrating through them; the wine was hot 
in her veins, the hate was hot in her heart; her eyes glittered 
with murderous meaning, and she darted with one swift bound 
to the side of the rival she loathed, with the pistol half out 
of her belt; she expected to see the one she threatened recoil, 
quail, hear the threat in terror; she mistook the nature witli 
which she dealt. Yenetia Corona never moved, never gave a 
sign of the amazement that awoke in her; but she put her hand 
out and clasped the barrel of the weapon, while her eyes looked 
down into the flashing, looming, ferocious ones that menaced 
her, with calm, contemptuous rebuke, in which something of 
infinite pity was mingled. 

“ Child, are you mad ? ” she said gravely. “ Brave natures 
do not stoop to assassination, which you seem to deify. If you 
have any reason to feel evil against me, tell me what it is. I 
always repair a wrong, if I can. But as for those threats, they 
are most absurd if you do not mean them ; they are most wicked 
if you do.” 

The tranquil, unmoved, serious words stilled the vehement 
passion she rebuked with a strange and irresistible power ; under 
her gaze the savage lust in Cigarette’s eyes died out, and their 
lids drooped over them; the dusky, scarlet color faded from 
her cheeks; for the first time in her life she felt humiliated, 
vanquished, awed. If this “ aristocrat ” had shown one sign of 
fear, one trace of apprehension, all her violent and reckless 
hatred would have reigned on, and, it might have been, have 
rushed from threat to execution; but showing the only quality, 
that of courage, for which she had respect, her great rival con- 
fused and disarmed her. She was only sensible, with a vivid, 
agonizing sense of shame, that her only cause of hatred against 
this woman was that he loved her. And this she would have 
died a thousand deaths rather than have acknowledged. 



Photo by Byron 




THE DESERT HAWK AND THE PARADISE-BIRD. 529 


She let the pistol pass into Venetia’s grasp; and stood, irreso- 
lute and ashamed, her fluent tongue stricken dumb, her intent 
to wound, and sting, and outrage with every vile, coarse jest 
she knew, rendered impossible to execute. The purity and the 
dignity of her opponent’s presence had their irresistible influ- 
ence, an influence too strong for even her debonnaire and dan- 
gerous insolence. She hated herself in that moment more than 
she hated her rival. 

Venetia laid the loaded pistol down, away from both, and 
seated herself on the cushions from which she had risen. Then 
she looked once ipore, long and quietly, at her unknown 
antagonist. 

“ Well? ” she said, at length. “ Why do you venture to come 
here? And why do you feel this malignity toward a stranger 
who never saw you until this morning ? ” 

Under the challenge the fiery spirit of Cigarette rallied, 
though a rare and galling sense of intense inferiority, of in- 
tense mortification, was upon her; though she would almost 
have given the Cross which was on her breast that she had 
never come into this woman’s sight. 

“ Oh, he ! ” she answered recklessly, with the red blood flush- 
ing her face again at the only evasion of truth of which the 
little desperado, with all her sins, had ever been guilty. “I 
hate you, Miladi, because of your Order — because of your na- 
tion — because of your fine, dainty ways — because of your aris- 
tocrat’s insolence — because you treat my soldiers like paupers — 
because you are one of those who do no more to have the right 
to live than the purple butterfly that flies in the sun, and who 
oust the people out of their dues as the cuckoo kicks the poor 
birds that have reared it, out of the nest of down, to which it 
never has carried a twig or a moss ! ” 

Her listener heard with a slight smile of amusement and of 
surprise that bitterly discomfited the speaker. To Venetia 
Corona the girl-soldier seemed mad; but it was a madness that 
interested her, and she knew at a glance that this child of the 
army was of no common nature and no common mind. 

“ I do not wish to discuss democracy with you,” she answered, 
with a tone that sounded strangely tranquil to Cigarette after 
the scathing acrimony of her own. “ I should probably con- 
vince you as little as you would convince me; and I never 
waste words. But I heard you to-day claim a certain virtue — 
justice. How do you reconcile with that your very hasty con- 


530 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


demnation of a stranger of whose motives, actions, and modes 
of life it is impossible you can have any accurate knowl- 
edge ? ” 

Cigarette once again was silenced; her face burned, her heart 
was hot with rage. She had come prepared to upbraid and 
to outrage this patrician with every jibe and grossness camp 
usage could supply her with, and — she stood dumb before her! 
She could only feel an all-absorbing sense of being ridiculous, 
and contemptible, and puerile in her sight. 

“ You bring two charges against me,” said Yenetia, when 
she had vainly awaited answer. “ That I treat your comrades 
like paupers, and that I rob the people — my own people, I im- 
agine you to mean — of their dues. In the first, how will you 
prove it ? — in the second, how can you know it ? ” 

“ Pardieu, Miladi ! ” swore Cigarette recklessly, seeking only 
to hold her own against the new sense of inferiority and of 
inability that oppressed her. “ I was in the hospital when your 
fruits and your wines came; and as for your people, I don’t 
speak of them — they are all slaves, they say, in Albion, and will 
bear to be yoked like oxen if they think they can turn any 
gold in the furrows — I speak of the people. Of the toiling, 
weary, agonized, joyless, hapless multitudes w T ho labor on, and 
on, and on, ever in darkness, that such as you may bask in sun- 
light and take your pleasures wrung out of the death-sweat 
of millions of work-murdered poor! What right have you to 
have your path strewn with roses, and every pain spared from 
you ; to only lift your voice and say, ‘ Let that be done,’ to see 
it done? — to find life one long, sweet summer day of gladness 
and abundance, while they die out in agony by thousands, ague- 
stricken, famine-stricken, crime-stricken, age-stricken, for want 
only of one ray of the light of happiness that falls from dawn 
to dawn like gold upon your head ? ” 

Vehement and exaggerated as the upbraiding was, her 
hearer’s face grew very grave, very thoughtful, as she spoke; 
those luminous, earnest eyes, whose power even the young 
democrat felt, gazed wearily down into hers. 

“Ah, child! do you think we never think of that? You 
wrong me — you wrong my Order. There are many besides my- 
self who turn over that terrible problem as despairingly as 
you can ever do. As far as in us lies, we strive to remedy its 
evil; the uttermost effort can do but little, but that little is 
only lessened — fearfully lessened — whenever Class is arrayed 


THE DESERT HAWK AND THE PARADISE-BIRD. 531 


against Class by that blind antagonism which animates your- 
self.” 

Cigarette’s intelligence was too rapid not to grasp the truths 
conveyed by these words; but she was in no mood to acknowl- 
edge them. 

“ Nom de Dieu, Miladi ! ” she swore in hfer teeth. “ If you 
do turn over the problem — you aristocrats — it is pretty work, 
no doubt ! just putting the bits of a puzzle-ball together so long 
as the game pleases you, and leaving the puzzle in chaos when 
you are tired ! Oh, he ! I know how fine ladies and fine gentle- 
men play at philanthropies! But I am a child of the People, 
mark you; and I only see how birth is an angel that gives such 
as you eternal sunlight and eternal summer, and how birth is 
a devil that drives down the millions into a pit of darkness, 
of crime, of ignorance, of misery, of suffering, where they are 
condemned before they have opened their eyes to existence, 
where they are sentenced before they have left their mothers’ 
bosoms in infancy. You do not know what that darkness is. It 
is night — it is ice — it is hell ! ” 

Venetia Corona sighed wearily as she heard; pain had been 
so far from her own life, and there was an intense eloquence in 
the low, deep words that seemed to thrill through the stillness. 

“ Nor do you know how many shadows checker that light 
which you envy ! But I have said ; it is useless for me to argue 
these questions with you. You commence with a hatred of a 
class; all justice is over wherever that element enters. If I 
were what you think, I should bid you leave my presence which 
you have entered so rudely. I do not desire to do that- I am 
sure that the heroine of Zaraila has something nobler in her 
than mere malignity against a person who can never have in- 
jured her; and I would endure her insolence for the sake of 
awakening her justice. A virtue, that was so great in her at 
noon, cannot be utterly dead at nightfall.” 

Cigarette’s fearless eyes drooped under the gaze of those betit 
so searchingly, yet so gently, upon her ; but only for a moment. 
She raised them afresh with their old dauntless frankness. 

“ Dieu ! you shall never say you wanted justice and truth 
from a French soldier, and failed to get them! I hate you, 
never mind why — I do, though you never harmed me. I came 
here for two reasons: one, because I wanted to look at you 
close — you are not like anything that I ever saw; the other, 
because I wanted to wound you, to hurt you, to outrage you, if 


532 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


I could find a way how. And you will not let me do it. I do 
not know what it is in you.” 

In all her courted life, the great lady had had no truer 
homage than lay in that irate, reluctant wonder of this fiery foe. 

She smiled slightly. 

“ My poor child, it is rather something in yourself — a native 
nobility that will not allow you to be as unjust and as insolent 
as your soul desires ” 

Cigarette gave a movement of intolerable impatience. 

“ Pardieu ! do not pity me, or I shall give you a taste of my 
‘ insolence * in earnest! You may be a sovereign grande dame 
everywhere else, but you can carry no terror with you for me, 
I promise you ! ” 

“ I do not seek to do so. If I did not feel interest in you, 
do you suppose I should suffer for a moment the ignorant 
rudeness of an ill-bred child? You fail in the tact, as in the 
courtesy, that belong to your nation.” 

The rebuke was gentle, but it was all the more severe for 
its very serenity. It cut Cigarette to the quick; it covered her 
with an overwhelming sense of mortification and of failure. 
She was too keen and too just, despite all her vanity, not to 
feel that she deserved the condemnation, and not to know that 
her opponent had all the advantage and all the justice on her 
side. She had done nothing by coming here ; nothing except to 
appear as an insolent and wayward child before her superb 
rival, and to feel a very anguish of inferiority before the grace, 
the calm, the beauty, the nameless, potent charm of this woman, 
whom she had intended to humiliate and injure! 

The inborn truth within her, the native generosity and candor 
that soon or late always overruled every other element in the 
Little One, conquered her now. She dashed down her Cross on 
the ground, and trod passionately on the decoration she adored. 

“ I disgrace it the first day I wear it! You are right, though 
I hate you, and you are as beautiful as a sorceress! There is 
no wonder he loves you ! ” 

“He! Who?” 

There was a colder and more utterly amazed hauteur in the 
interrogation than had come into her voice throughout the in- 
terview, yet on her fair face a faint warmth rose. 

The words were out, and Cigarette was reckless what she 
said; almost unconscious, indeed, in the violence of the many 
emotions in her. 



Photo by Sarony 




THE DESERT HAWK AND THE PARADISE-BIRD. 533 


“ The man who carves the toys you give your dog to break ! ” 
she answered bitterly. “ Dieu de Dieu ! he loves you. When 
he was down with his wounds after Zaraila, he said so; but he 
never knew what he said, and he never knew that I heard him. 
You are like the women of his old world; though through you 
he got treated like a dog, he loves you ! ” 

“ Of whom do you venture to speak ? ” 

The cold, calm dignity of the question, whose very tone was 
a rebuke, came strangely after the violent audacity of Ciga- 
rette^ speech. 

“ Sacre bleu ! of him, I tell you, who was made to bring his 
wares to you like a hawker. And you think it insult, I will 
warrant ! — insult for a soldier who has nothing but his courage, 
and his endurance, and his heroism under suffering to ennoble 
him, to dare to love Mme. la Princesse Corona! I think other- 
wise. I think that Mme. la Princesse Corona never had a love 
of so much honor, though she has had princes and nobles and 
all the men of her rank, no doubt, at her feet, through that 
beauty that is like a spell ! ” 

Hurried headlong by her own vehemence, and her own hatred 
for her rival, which drove her to magnify the worth of the 
passion of which she was so jealous, that she might lessen, if 
she could, the pride of her on whom it was lavished, she never 
paused to care what she said, or heed what its consequences 
might become. She felt incensed, amazed, irritated, to see no 
trace of any emotion come on her hearer’s face; the hot, im- 
petuous, expansive, untrained nature underrated the power for 
self-command of the Order she so blindly hated. 

“ You speak idly and at random, like the child you are,” the 
grande dame answered her with chill, contemptuous rebuke. 
“ I do not imagine that the person you allude to made you his 
confidante in such a matter ? ” 

“ He ! ” retorted Cigarette. “ He belongs to your class, Mi- 
ladi. He is as silent as the grave. You might kill him, and 
he would never show it hurt. I only know what he muttered in 
his fever.” 

“ When you attended him ? ” 

“Hot I! ” cried Cigarette, who saw for the first time that she 
was betraying herself. “ He lay in the scullion’s tent where 
I was ; that was all ; and he was delirious with the shot-wounds. 
Men often are ” 

“Wait! Hear me a little while, before you rush on in this 


534 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


headlong and foolish speech,” interrupted her auditor, who had 
in a moment’s rapid thought decided on her course with this 
strange, wayward nature. “ You err in the construction you 
have placed on the words, whatever they were, which you heard. 
The gentleman — he is a gentleman — whom you speak of bears 
me no love. We are almost strangers. But by a strange chain 
of circumstances he is connected with my family; he once had 
great friendship with my brother; for reasons that I do not 
know, but which are imperative with him, he desires to keep 
his identity unsuspected by everyone; an accident alone re- 
vealed it to me, and I have promised him not to divulge it. 
You understand?” 

Cigarette gave an affirmative gesture. Her eyes were fas- 
tened suddenly, yet with a deep, bright glow in them, upon her 
companion ; she was beginning to see her way through his secret 
— a secret she was too intrinsically loyal even now to dream 
of betraying. 

“ You spoke very nobly for him to-day. You have the fealty 
of one brave character to another, I am sure ! ” pursued 
Yenetia Corona, purposely avoiding all hints of any warmer 
feeling on her listener’s part, since she saw how tenacious the 
girl was of any confession of it. “ You would do him service 
if you could, I fancy. Am I right ? ” 

“ Oh, yes ! ” answered Cigarette, with an over-assumption of 
carelessness. “He is bon zig; we always help each other. Be- 
sides, he is very good to my men. What is it you want of 
me? ” 

“ To preserve secrecy on what I have told you for his sake; 
and to give him a message from me.” 

Cigarette laughed scornfully; she was furious with herself 
for standing obediently like a chidden child to hear this pa- 
trician’s bidding, and to do her will. And yet, try how she 
would, she could not shake off the spell under which those 
grave, sweet, lustrous eyes of command held her. 

“ Pardieu, Miladi ! Do you think I babble like any young 
bleu drunk with his first measure of wine? As for your mes- 
sage, you had better let him come and hear what you have to 
say ; I cannot promise to remember it ! ” 

“Your answer is reckless; I want a serious one. You spoke 
like a brave and a just friend to him to-day; are you willing 
to act as such to-night? You have come here strangely, rudely, 
without pretext or apology; but I think better of you than you 


THE DESERT HAWK AKD THE PARADISE-BIRD. 535 


would allow me to do, if I judged only from the surface. I 
believe that you have loyalty, as I know that you have courage.” 

Cigarette set her teeth hard. 

“ What of that ? I have them en militaire, that is all.” 

“ This of it. That one who has them will never cherish malice 
unjustifiably, or fail to fulfill a trust.” 

Cigarette’s clear, brown skin grew very red. 

“ That is true,” she muttered reluctantly. Her better nature 
was growing uppermost, though she strove hard to keep the 
evil one predominant. 

“ Then you will cease to feel hatred toward me for so sense- 
less a reason as that I belong to an aristocracy that offends you ; 
and you will remain silent on what I tell you concerning the 
one whom you know as Louis Victor?” 

Cigarette nodded assent; the sullen fire-glow still burned 
in her eyes, but she succumbed to the resistless influence which 
the serenity, the patience, and the dignity of this woman had 
over her. She was studying Venetia Corona all this while with 
the keen, rapid perceptions of envy and of jealousy; studying 
her features, her form, her dress, her attitude, all the many 
various and intangible marks of birth and breeding which were 
so new to her, and which made her rival seem so strange, so 
dazzling, so marvelous a sorceress to her; and all the while the 
sense of her own inferiority, her own worthlessness, her own 
boldness, her own debasement was growing upon her, eating, 
sharply as aquafortis into brass, into the metal of her vanity 
and her pride, humiliating her unbearably, yet making her 
heart ache with a sad, pathetic pity for herself. 

“ He is of your Order, then ? ” she asked abruptly. 

“He was — yes.” 

“ Oh, he ! ” cried Cigarette, with her old irony. “ Then he 
must be always, mustn’t he? You think too much of your blue 
blood, you patricians, to fancy it can lose its royalty, whether 
it run under a King’s purple or a Roumi’s canvas shirt. Blood 
tells, they say! Well, perhaps it does. Some say my father 
was a Prince of France — maybe! So, he is of your Order? 
Bah ! I knew that the first day I saw his hands. Do you want 
me to tell you why he lives among us, buried like this ? ” 

“ Hot if you violate any confidence to do so.” 

“ Pardieu ! he makes no confidence, I promise you. Hot ten 
words will Monseigneur say, if he can help it, about anything. 
He is as silent as a lama ; it is populacier to talk ! But we learn 


536 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


things without being told in camp; and I know well enough 
he is here to save someone else, in someone’s place; it is a sacri- 
fice, look you, that nails him down to this martyrdom.” 

Her auditor was silent; she thought as the vivandiere 
thought, but the pride in her, the natural reticence and reserve 
of her class, made her shrink from discussing the history of one 
whom she knew — shrink from having any argument on his past 
or future with a saucy, rough, fiery young camp-follower, who 
had broken thus unceremoniously on her privacy. Yet she 
needed greatly to be able to trust Cigarette; the child was the 
only means through which she could send him a warning that 
must be sent; and there were a bravery and a truth in her 
which attracted the “ aristocrat,” to whom she was as singular 
and novel a rarity as though she were some young savage of 
desert western isles. 

“ Look you, Miladi,” said Cigarette, half sullenly, half pas- 
sionately, for the words were wrenched out of her generosity, 
and choked her in their utterance, “ that man suffers ; his life 
here is a hell upon earth — I don’t mean for the danger, he is 
bon soldat ; btit for the indignity, the subordination, the license, 
the brutality, the tyranny. He is as if he were chained to the 
galleys. He never says anything. Oh, no! he is of your kind, 
you know! But he suffers. Mort de Dieu! he suffers. How, 
if you be his friend, can you do nothing for him? Can you 
ransom him in no way? Can you go away out of Africa and 
leave him in this living death to get killed and thrust into the 
sand, like his comrade the other day ? ” 

Her hearer did not answer; the words made her heart ache; 
they cut her to the soul. It was not for the first time that the 
awful desolation of his future had been present before her; 
but it was the first time that the fate to which she would pass 
away and leave him had been so directly in words before her. 
Cigarette, obeying the generous impulses of her better nature, 
and abandoning self with the same reckless impetuosity with 
which a moment before she would, if she could, have sacrificed 
her rival, saw the advantage gained, and pursued it with rapid 
skill. She was pleading against herself; no matter. In that 
instant she was capable of crucifying herself, and only remem- 
bering mercy to the absent. 

“ I have heard,” she went on vehemently, for the utterance 
to which she forced herself was very cruel to her, “ that you 
of the Noblesse are stanch as steel to your own people. It is 


THE DESERT HAWK AND THE PARADISE-BIRD. 537 


the best virtue that you have. Well, he is of your people. Will 
you go away in your negligent indifference, and leave him to 
eat his heart out in bitterness and misery? He was your 
brother’s friend; he was known to you in his early time; you 
said so. And are you cold enough and cruel enough, Miladi, 
not to make one effort to redeem him out of bondage? — to go 
back to your palaces, and your pleasures, and your luxuries, 
and your flatteries, and be happy, while this man is left on bear- 
ing his yoke here? — and it is a yoke that galls, that kills! — 
bearing it until, in some day of desperation, he rebels and is 
shot like a dog; or, in some day of mercy, a naked blade cuts 
its way to his heart, and makes its pulse cease forever ? If 
you do, you patricians are worse still than I thought 
you ! ” 

Venetia heard her without interruption; a great sadness came 
over her face as the vivid phrases followed each other. She 
was too absorbed in the subject of them to heed the challenge 
and the insolence of their manner. She knew that the Little 
One who spoke them loved him, though so tenacious to con- 
ceal her love ; and she was touched, not less by the magnanimity 
which, for his sake, sought to release him from the African 
service, than by the hopelessness of his coming years as thus 
prefigured before her. 

“ Your reproaches are unneeded,” she replied, slowly and 
wearily. “ I could not abandon one who was once the friend 
of my family to such a fate as you picture without very great 
pain. But I do not see how to alter this fate, as you think 
I could do with so much ease. I am not in its secret; I do not 
know the reason of its seeming suicide; I have no more con- 
nection with its intricacies than you have. This gentleman has 
chosen his own path; it is not for me to change his choice or 
spy into his motives.” 

Cigarette’s flashing, searching eyes bent all their brown light 
on her. 

“ Mme. Corona, you are courageous ; to those who are so, all 
things are possible.” 

“A great fallacy! You must have seen many courageous 
men vanquished. But what would you imply by it ? ” 

“ That you can help this man, if you will.” 

“ Would that I could; but I can discern no means ” 

“ Make them.” 

Even in that moment her listener smiled involuntarily at the 


538 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


curt, imperious tones, decisive as Napoleon’s “ Partons ! ” be- 
fore the Passage of the Alps. 

“ Be certain, if I can, I will. Meantime, there is one press- 
ing danger of which you must be my medium to warn him. He 
and my brother must not meet. Tell him that the latter, know- 
ing him only as Louis Victor, and interested in the incidents 
of his military career, will seek him out early to-morrow morn- 
ing before we quit the camp. I must leave it to him to avoid 
the meeting as best he may be able.” 

Cigarette smiled grimly. 

“ You do not know much of the camp. Victor is only a bas- 
officier; if his officers call him up, he must come, or be thrashed 
like a slave for contumacy. He has no will of his own.” 

Venetia gave an irrepressible gesture of pain. 

“True; I forgot. Well, go and send him to me. My 
brother must be taken into his confidence, whatever that con- 
fidence reveals. I will tell him so. Go and send him to me; 
it is the last chance.” 

Cigarette gave no movement of assent; all the jealous rage 
in her flared up afresh to stifle the noble and unselfish instincts 
under which she had been led during the later moments. A 
coarse and impudent scoff rose to her tongue, but it remained 
unuttered ; she could not speak it under that glance, which held 
the evil in her in subjection, and compelled her reluctant 
reverence against her will. 

“ Tell him to come here to me,” repeated Venetia, with the 
calm decision of one to whom any possibility of false inter- 
pretation of her motives never occurred, and who was habitu- 
ated to the free action that accompanied an unassailable rank. 
“ My brother must know what I know. I shall be alone, and 
he can make his way hither, without doubt, unobserved. Go 
and say this to him. You are his loyal little friend and com- 
rade.” 

“ If I be, I do not see why I am to turn your lackey, 
Madame,” said Cigarette bitterly. “ If you want him, you can 
send for him by other messengers ! ” 

Venetia Corona looked at her steadfastly, with a certain con- 
tempt in the look. 

“ Then your pleading for him was all insincere ? Let the 
matter drop, and be good enough to leave my presence, which, 
you will remember, you entered unsummoned and undesired.” 

The undeviating gentleness of the tone made the rebuke cut 


THE DESERT HAWK AND THE PARADISE-BIRD. 539 


deeper, as her first rebuke had cut, than any sterner censure 
or more peremptory dismissal could have done. Cigarette stood 
irresolute, ashamed, filled with rage, torn by contrition, impa- 
tient, wounded, swayed by jealous rage and by the purer im- 
pulses she strove to stifle. 

The Cross she had tossed down caught her sight as it glit- 
tered on the carpet strewn over the hard earth; she stooped 
and raised it; the action sufficed to turn the tide with her im- 
pressionable, ardent, capricious nature; she would not disgrace 
that. 

“ I will go,” she muttered in her throat ; “ and you — you — 
O God ! no wonder men love you when even I cannot hate you ! ” 

Almost ere the words were uttered she had dashed aside the 
hangings before the tent entrance, and had darted out into 
the night air. Venetia Corona gazed after the swiftly flying 
figure as it passed over the starlit ground, lost in amazement, 
in pity, and in regret ; wondering afresh if she had only dreamed 
of this strange interview in the Algerian camp, which seemed 
to have come and gone with the blinding rapidity of lightning. 

“ A little tigress ! ” she thought ; “ and yet with infinite no- 
bility, with wonderful germs of good in her. Of such a nature 
what a rare life might have been made ! As it is, her childhood 
we smile at and forgive; but, great Heaven! what will be her 
maturity, her old age! Yet how she loves him! And she is 
so brave she will not show it.” 

With the recollection came the remembrance of Cigarette’s 
words as to his own passion for herself, and she grew paler 
as it did so. “ God forbid he should have that pain, too ! ” 
she murmured. “ What could it be save misery for us both? ” 

Yet she did not thrust the fancy from her with contemptuous 
nonchalance as she had done every other of the many passions 
she had excited and disdained; it had a great sadness and a 
greater terror for her. She dreaded it unspeakably for him; 
also, perhaps, unconsciously, she dreaded it slightly for herself. 

She wished now that she had not sent for him. But it was 
done; it was for sake of their old friendship; and she was not 
one to vainly regret what was unalterable, or to desert what 
she deemed generous and right for the considerations of pru- 
dence or of egotism. 


CHAPTER XXXV. 


ORDEAL BY FIRE. 

Amid the mirth, the noise, the festivity, which reigned 
throughout the camp as the men surrendered themselves to 
the enjoyment of the largesses of food and of wine allotted to 
them by their Marshal’s command in commemoration of Za- 
raila, one alone remained apart; silent and powerless to rouse 
himself even to the forced semblance, the forced endurance, of 
their mischief and their pleasure. They knew him well, and 
they also loved him too well to press such participation on him. 
They knew that it was no lack of sympathy with them that 
made him so grave amid their mirth, so mute amid their volu- 
bility. Some thought that he was sorely wounded by the delay 
of the honors promised him. Others, who knew him better, 
thought that it was the loss of his brother-exile which weighed 
on him, and made all the scene around him full of pain. None 
approached him; but while they feasted in their tents, making 
the celebration of Zaraila equal to the Jour de Mazagran, he 
sat alone over a picket-fire on the far outskirts of the camp. 

His heart was sick within him. To remain here was to risk 
with every moment that ordeal of recognition which he so un- 
utterably dreaded; and to flee was to leave his name to the 
men, with whom he had served so long, covered with obloquy 
and odium, buried under all the burning shame and degrada- 
tion of a traitor’s and deserter’s memory. The latter course 
was impossible to him; the only alternative was to trust that 
the vastness of that great concrete body, of which he was one 
unit, would suffice to hide him from the discovery of the friend 
whose love he feared as he feared the hatred of no foe. He 
had not been seen as he had passed the flag-staff; there was 
little fear that in the few remaining hours any chance could 
bring the illustrious guest of a Marshal to the outpost of the 
scattered camp. 

Yet he shuddered as he sat in the glow of the fire of pine- 
wood; she was so near, and he could not behold her! — though 
he might never see her face again; though they must pass out 

540 


ORDEAL BY FIRE. 


541 


of Africa, home to the land that he desired as only exiles can 
desire, while he still remained silent, knowing that, until death 
should release him, there could be no other fate for him, save 
only this one, hard, bitter, desolate, uncompanioned, unpitied, 
unrewarded life. But to break his word as the price of his 
freedom was not possible to his nature or in his creed. This 
fate was, in chief, of his own making; he accepted it without 
rebellion, because rebellion would have been in this case both 
cowardice and self-pity. 

He was not conscious of any heroism in this; it seemed to 
him the only course left to a man who, in losing the position, 
had not abandoned the instincts of a gentleman. 

The evening wore away, unmeasured by him; the echoes of 
the soldiers’ mirth came dimly on his ear; the laughter, and 
the songs, and the music were subdued into one confused mur- 
mur bv distance; there was nothing near him except a few 
tethered horses, and far away the mounted figure of the vedette 
who kept watch beyond the boundaries of the encampment. 
The fire burned on, for it had been piled high before it was 
abandoned; the little white dog of his regiment was curled at 
his feet; he sat motionless, sunk in thought, with his head 
drooped upon his breast. The voice of Cigarette broke on his 
musing. 

“ Beau sire, you are wanted yonder.” 

He looked up wearily; could he never be at peace? He did 
not notice that the tone of the greeting was rough and curt; 
he did not notice that there was a stormy darkness, a repressed 
bitterness, stern and scornful, on the Little One’s face; he only 
thought that the very dogs were left sometimes at rest and 
unchained, but a soldier never. 

“You are wanted!” repeated Cigarette, with imperious con- 
tempt. 

He rose, on the old instinct of obedience. 

“ For what? ” 

She stood looking at him without replying; her mouth was 
tightly shut in a hard line that pressed inward all its soft and 
rosy prettiness. She was seeing how haggard his face was, how 
heavy his eyes, how full of fatigue his movements. Her silence 
recalled him to the memory of the past day. 

“ Forgive me, my dear child, if I have seemed without sym- 
pathy in all your honors,” he said gently, as he laid his hand 
on her shoulder. “ Believe me, it was unintentional. No one 


542 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


knows better than I how richly you deserved them; no one re- 
joices more that you should have received them.” 

The very gentleness of the apology stung her like a scorpion ; 
she shook herself roughly out of his hold. 

“Point de phrases! All the army is at my back; do you 
think I cannot do without you? Sympathy too! Bah! We- 
don’t know those fine words in camp. You are wanted, I tell 
you — go ! ” 

“ But where?” 

“To your Silver Pheasant yonder — go ! ” 

“Who? I do not ” 

“ Dame ! Can you not understand ? Miladi wants to see you j 
I told her I would send you to her. You can use your dainty 
sentences with her ; she is of your Order ! ” 

“ What ! she wishes ” 

“ Go ! ” reiterated the Little One with a stamp of her boot.. 
“ You know the great tent where she is throned in honor — 
Morbleu! — as if the oldest and ugliest hag that washes out my 
soldiers’ linen were not of more use and more deserved such 
lodgment than Mme. la Princesse, who has never done aught 
in her life, not even brushed out her own hair of gold! She 
waits for you. Where are your palace manners? Go to her, 
I tell you. She is of your own people ; we are not ! ” 

The vehement, imperious phrases coursed in disorder one- 
after another, rapid and harsh, and vibrating with a hundred 
repressed emotions. He paused one moment, doubting whether 
she did not play some trick upon him ; then, without a word, 
left her, and went rapidly through the evening shadows. 

Cigarette stood looking after him with a gaze that was very- 
evil, almost savage, in its wrath, in its pain, in its fiery jealousy, 
that ached so hotly in her, and was chained down by that pride 
which was as intense in the Vivandiere of Algeria as ever it 
could be in any Duchess of a Court. Reckless, unfeminine, 
hardened, vitiated in much, as all her sex would have deemed, 
and capable of the utmost abandonment to her passion had 
it been returned, the haughty young soul of the child of the 
People was as sensitively delicate in this one thing as the purest 
and chastest among women could have been ; she dreaded above 
every other thing that he should ever suspect that she loved 
him, or that she desired his love. 

Her honor, her generosity, her pity for him, her natural in- 
stinct to do the thing that was right, even to her foes, any one 


* 



Photo by Byron 







ORDEAL BY FIRE. 


543 


of the unstudied and unanalyzed qualities in her had made 
her serve him even at her rival’s bidding. But it had cost her 
none the less hardly because so manfully done; none the less 
did all the violent, ruthless hate, the vivid, childlike fury, the 
burning, intolerable jealousy of her nature combat in her with 
the cruel sense of her own unlikeness with that beauty which 
had subdued even herself, and with that nobler impulse of self- 
sacrifice which grew side by side with the baser impulses of 
passion. 

As she crouched down by the side of the fire all the gracious, 
spiritual light that had been upon her face was gone ; there was 
something of the goaded, dangerous, sullen ferocity of a brave 
animal hard-pressed and over-driven. 

Her native generosity, the loyal disinterestedness of her love 
for him, had overborne the jealousy, the wounded vanity, and 
the desire of vengeance that reigned in her. Carried away 
by the first, she had, for the hour, risen above the last, and 
allowed the nobler wish to serve and rescue him to prevail 
over the baser egotism. Nothing with her was ever premedi- 
tated; all was the offspring of the caprice or the impulse of 
the immediate moment. And now the reaction followed; she 
was only sensible of the burning envy that consumed her of 
this woman who seemed to her more than mortal in her won- 
derful, fair loveliness, in her marvelous difference from every- 
thing of their sex that the camp and the barrack ever showed. 

“ And I have sent him to her when I should have fired my 
pistol into her breast ! ” she thought, as she sat by the dying 
embers. And she remembered once more the story of the Mar- 
seilles fisherwoman. She understood that terrible vengeance 
under the hot, southern sun, beside the ruthless, southern seas. 

Meanwhile he, who so little knew or heeded how he occupied 
her heart, p ssed unnoticed through the movements of the mili- 
tary crowds, crossed the breadth that parted the encampment 
from the marquees of the Generals and their guests, gave the 
countersign and approached unarrested, and so far unseen save 
by the sentinels, the tents of the Corona suite. The Marshal 
and his male visitors were still over their banquet wines; she 
had withdrawn early, on the plea of fatigue; there was no one 
to notice his visit except the men on guard, who concluded that 
he went by command. In the dusky light, for the moon was 
very young, and the flare of the torches made the shadows black 


544 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


and uncertain, no one recognized him; the few soldiers sta- 
tioned about saw one of their own troopers, and offered him no 
opposition, made him no question. He knew the password ; that 
was sufficient. The Levantine waiting near the entrance drew 
the tent-folds aside and signed to him to enter. Another mo- 
ment, and he was in the presence of her mistress, in that dim, 
amber light from the standing candelebra, in that heavy, soft- 
scented air perfumed from the aloe-wood burning in a brazier, 
through which he saw, half blinded at first, coming from the 
darkness without, that face which subdued and dazzled even the 
antagonism and the lawlessness of Cigarette. 

He bowed low before her, preserving that distant ceremonial 
due from the rank he ostensibly held to hers. 

“ Madame, this is very merciful ! I know not how to thank 
you.” 

She motioned to him to take a seat near to her, while the 
Levantine, who knew nothing of the English tongue, retired to 
the farther end of the tent. 

“ I only kept my word,” she answered, “ for we leave the 
camp to-morrow; Africa next week.” 

“ So soon!” 

She saw the blood forsake the bronzed fairness of his face, 
and leave a dusky pallor there. It wounded her as if she suf- 
fered herself. For the first time she believed what the Little 
One had said — that this man loved her. 

u I sent for you,” she continued hurriedly, her graceful lan- 
guor and tranquillity for the first time stirred and quickened 
by emotion, almost by embarrassment. “ It was very strange, 
it was very painful, for me to trust that child with such a mes- 
sage. But you know us of old; you know we do not forsake 
our friends for considerations of self-interest or outward sem- 
blance. We act as we deem right; we do not heed untrue 
constructions. There are many things I desire to say to 
you ” 

She paused; he merely bent his head; he could not trust the 
calmness of his voice in answer. 

“ First,” she continued, “ I must entreat you to allow me to 
tell Philip what I know. You cannot conceive how intensely 
oppressive it becomes to me to have any secret from him. I 
never concealed so much as a thought from my brother in all 
my life, and to evade even a mute question from his brave, 
frank eyes makes me feel a traitress to him.” 


ORDEAL BY FIRE. 545 

“ Anything else,” he muttered. “ Ask me anything else. For 
God’s sake, do not let him dream that I live ! ” 

“But why? You still speak to me in enigmas. To-morrow, 
moreover, before we leave, he intends to seek you out as what 
he thinks you — a soldier of France. He is interested by all he 
hears of your career; he was first interested by what I told him 
of you when he saw the ivory carvings at my villa. I asked 
the little vivandiere to tell you this, but, on second thoughts, 
it seemed best to see you myself once more, as I had promised.” 

There was a slow weariness in the utterance of the words. 
She had said that she could not reflect on leaving him to such 
a fate as this of his in Africa without personal suffering, or 
without an effort to induce him to reconsider his decision to 
condemn himself to it for evermore. 

“ That French child,” she went on rapidly, to cover both the 
pain that she felt and that she dealt, “ forced her entrance 
here in a strange fashion ; she wished to see me, I suppose, and 
to try «my courage too. She is a little brigand, but she has 
a true and generous nature, and she loves you very loyally.” 

“ Cigarette ? ” he asked wearily ; his thoughts could not stay 
for either pity or interest for her in this moment. “ Oh, no ! 
I trust not. I have done nothing to win her love; and she is 
a fierce little condottiera who disdains all such weakness. She 
forced her way in here? That was unpardonable; but she 
seems to bear a singular dislike to you.” 

“ Singular, indeed ! I never saw her until to-day.” 

He answered nothing; the conviction stole on him that Ciga- 
rette hated her because he loved her. 

“ And yet she brought you my message ? ” pursued his com- 
panion. “ That seems her nature — violent passions, yet thor- 
ough loyalty. But time is precious. I must urge on you what 
I bade you come to hear. It is to implore you to put your 
trust, your confidence, in Philip. You have acknowledged to 
me that you are guiltless — no one who knows what you once 
were could ever doubt it for an instant — then let him hear 
this, let him be your judge as to what course is right and what 
wrong for you to pursue. It is impossible for me to return to 
Europe knowing you are living thus and leaving you to such 
a fate. What motive you have to sentence yourself to such 
eternal banishment I am ignorant; but all I ask of you is, con- 
fide in him. Let him learn that you live; let him decide 
whether or not this sacrifice of yourself be needed. His honor 


546 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


is as punctilious as that of any man on earth; his friendship 
you can never doubt'. Why conceal anything from him ? ” 

His eyes turned on her with that dumb agony which once 
before had chilled her to the soul. 

“ Do you think, if I could speak in honor, I should not tell 
you all ? v 

A flush passed over her face, the first that the gaze of any 
man had ever brought there. She understood him. 

“ But,” she said, gently and hurriedly, “ may it not be that 
you overrate the obligations of honor? I know that many a 
noble-hearted man has inexorably condemned himself to a se- 
verity of rule that a dispassionate judge of his life might deem 
very exaggerated, very unnecessary. It is so natural for an 
honorable man to so dread that he should do a dishonorable 
thing through self-interest or self-pity, that he may very well 
overestimate the sacrifice required of him through what he 
deems justice or generosity. May it not be so with you? I can 
conceive no reason that can be strong enough to require of you 
such fearful surrender of every hope, such utter abandonment 
of your own existence.” 

Her voice failed slightly over the last words; she could not 
think with calmness of the destiny that he accepted. Involun- 
tarily some prescience of pain that would forever pursue her 
own life unless his were rescued lent an intense earnestness, 
almost entreaty, to her argument. She did not bear him love 
as yet; she had seen too little of him, too lately only known 
him as her equal; but there were in her, stronger than she 
knew, a pity, a tenderness, a regret, an honor for him that 
drew her toward him with an indefinable attraction, and would 
sooner or later warm and deepen into love. Already it was 
sufficient, though she deemed it but compassion and friendship, 
to make her feel that an intolerable weight would lie heavy 
on her future if his should remain condemned to this awful 
isolation and oblivion while she alone of all the world should 
know and hold his secret. 

He started from her side as he heard, and paced to and fro 
the narrow limits of the tent like a caged animal. For the first 
time it grew a belief to him, in his thoughts, that were he free, 
were he owner of his heritage, he could rouse her heart from its 
long repose and make her love him with the soft and passionate 
warmth of his dead Arab mistress — a thing that had been as 
distant from her negligence and her pride as warmth from the 


ORDEAL BY FIRE. 


547 


diamond or the crystal. He felt as if the struggle would kill 
him. He had but to betray his brother, and he would be un- 
chained from his torture; he had but to break his word, and he 
"would be at liberty. All the temptation that had before beset 
him paled and grew as naught beside this possibility of the 
possession of her love which dawned upon him now. 

She, knowing nothing of this which moved him, believed only 
that he weighed her words in hesitation, and strove to turn the 
balance. 

“ Hear me,” she said softly. “ I do not bid you decide ; I 
only bid you confide in Philip — in one who, as you must well 
remember, would sooner cut off his own hand than counsel a 
base thing or do an unfaithful act. You are guiltless of this 
•charge under which you left England; you endure it rather 
than do what you deem dishonorable to clear yourself. That 
is noble — that is great. But it is possible, as I say, that you 
may exaggerate the abnegation required of you. Whoever was 
the criminal should suffer. Yours is magnificent magnanimity; 
hut it may surely be also false justice alike to yourself and the 
-world.” 

He turned on her almost fiercely in the suffering she dealt 
him. 

“ It is ! It was a madness — a Quixotism — the wild, unconsid- 
cred act of a fool. What you will! But it is done; it was done 
forever — so long ago — when your young eyes looked on me in 
the pity of your innocent childhood. I cannot redeem its folly 
now by adding to its baseness. I cannot change the choice of 
a madman by repenting of it with a coward’s caprice. Ah, God ! 
you do not know what you do — how you tempt. For pity’s sake, 
urge me no more. Help me — strengthen me — to be true to 
my word. Ho not bid me do evil that I may enter paradise 
through my sin ! ” 

He threw himself down beside her as the incoherent words 
poured out, his arms flung across the pile ol cushions on which 
he had been seated, his face hidden on them. His teeth clinched 
on his tongue till the blood flowed; he felt that if the power of 
speech remained with him he should forswear every law that 
had bound him to silence, and tell her all, whatever the cost. 

She looked at him, she heard him, moved to a greater agita- 
tion than ever had had sway over her; for the first time the 
storm winds that swept by her did not leave her passionless 
nnd calm ; this man’s whole future was in her hands. She could 


548 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


bid him seek happiness, dishonored; or cleave to honor, and 
accept wretchedness forever. 

It was a fearful choice to hold. 

“ Answer me ! Choose for me ! ” he said vehemently. “ Be 
my law, and be my God ! ” 

She gave a gesture almost of fear. 

“ Hush, hush ! The woman does not live who should be that 
to any man.” 

“You shall be it to me! Choose for me! ” 

“I cannot! You leave so much in darkness and untold ” 

“ Nothing that you need know to decide your choice for me, 
save one thing only — that I love you.” 

She shuddered. 

“This is madness! What have you seen of me?” 

“ Enough to love you while my life shall last, and love no 
other woman. Ah ! I was but an African trooper in your sight, 
but in my own I was your equal. You only saw a man to whom 
your gracious alms and your gentle charity were to be given, 
as a queen may stoop in mercy to a beggar; but I saw one who 
had the light of my old days in her smile, the sweetness of my 
old joys in her eyes, the memories of my old world in her every 
grace and gesture. You forget ! I was nothing to you; but you 
were so much to me. I loved you the first moment that your 
voice fell on my ear. It is madness! Oh, yes! I should have 
said so, too, in those old years. A madness I would have sworn 
never to feel. But I have lived a hard life since then, and no 
men ever love like those who suffer. Now you know all; know 
the worst that tempts me. No famine, no humiliation, no 
obloquy, no loss I have known, ever drove me so cruelly to buy 
back my happiness with the price of dishonor as this one de- 
sire — to stand in my rightful place before men, and be free to 
strive with you for what they have not won ! ” 

As she heard, all the warmth, all the life, faded out of her 
face; it grew as white as his own, and her lips parted slightly, 
as though to draw her breath was oppressive. The wild words 
overwhelmed her with their surprise not less than they shocked 
her with their despair. An intense truth vibrated through 
them, a truth that pierced her and reached her heart, as no other 
such supplication ever had done. She had no love for him yet, 
or she thought not; she was very proud, and resisted such pas- 
sions; but in that moment the thought swept by her that such, 
love might be jjossible. It was the nearest submission to it she 


ORDEAL BY FIRE. 


549 


had ever given. She heard him in unbroken silence; she kept 
silence long after he had spoken. So far as her courage and 
her dignity could be touched with it, she felt something akin 
to terror at the magnitude of the choice left to her. 

“ You give me great pain, great surprise,” she murmured. 
“ All I can trust is that your love is of such sudden birth that 
it will die as rapidly ” 

He interrupted her. 

“ You mean that, under no circumstances — not even were 
I to possess my inheritance — could you give me any hope that 
I might wake your tenderness ? ” 

She looked at him full in the eyes with the old, fearless, 
haughty instinct of refusal to all such entreaty, which had 
made her so indifferent — and many said so pitiless — to all. At 
his gaze, however, her own changed and softened, grew shad- 
owed, and then wandered from him. 

“ I do not say that. I cannot tell ” 

The words were very low; she was too truthful to conceal 
from him what half dawned on herself — the possibility that, 
more in his presence and under different circumstances, she 
might feel her heart go to him with a warmer and a softer 
impulse than that of friendship. The heroism of his life had 
moved her greatly. 

His head dropped down again upon his arms. 

“ 0 God ! It is possible, at least ! I am blind — mad. Make 
my choice for me ! I know not what I do.” 

The tears that had gathered in her eyes fell slowly down 
over her colorless cheeks; she looked at him with a pity that 
made her heart ache with a sorrow only less than his own. The 
grief was for him chiefly ; yet something of it for herself. Some 
sense of present bitterness that fell on her from his fate, some 
foreboding of future regret that would inevitably and forever 
follow her when she left him to his loneliness and his misery, 
smote on her with a weightier pang than any her caressed and 
cloudless existence had encountered. Love was dimly before her 
as the possibility he called it; remote, unrealized, still unac- 
knowledged, but possible under certain conditions, only known 
as such when it was also impossible through circumstances. 

He had suffered silently; endured strongly; fought greatly; 
these were the only means through which any man could have 
ever reached her sympathy, her respect, her tenderness. Yet, 
though a very noble and a very generous woman, she was also 


550 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


a woman of the world. She knew that it was not for her to 
say even thus much to a man who was in one sense well-nigh 
a stranger, and who stood under the accusation of a crime whose 
shadow he allowed to rest on him unmoved. She felt sick at 
heart; she longed unutterably, with a warmer longing than had 
moved her previously, to bid him, at all cost, lay bare his past, 
and throw off the imputed shame that lay on him. Yet all the 
grand traditions of her race forbade her to counsel the ac- 
ceptance of an escape whose way led through a forfeiture of 
honor. 

“ Choose for me, Venetia ! ” he muttered at last once more. 

She ruse with what was almost a gesture of despair, and 
thrust the gold hair off her temples. 

“ Heaven help me, I cannot — I dare not ! And — I am no 
longer capable of being just! ” 

There was an accent almost of passion in her voice; she felt 
that so greatly did she desire his deliverance, his justification, 
his return to all which was his own — desired even his presence 
among them in her own world — that she could no longer give 
him calm and unbiased judgment. He heard, and the burning 
tide of a new joy rushed on him, checked almost ere it was 
known, by the dread lest for her sake she should ever give him 
so much pity that such pity became love. 

He started to his feet and looked down imploringly into her 
eyes — a look under which her own never quailed or drooped, 
but which they answered with that same regard which she had 
given him "when she had declared her faith in his innocence. 

“ If I thought it possible you could ever care ” 

She moved slightly from him; her face was very white still, 
and her voice, though serenely sustained, shook as it answered 
him. 

“ If I could — believe me, I am not a woman who would bid 
you forsake your honor to spare yourself or me. Let us speak 
no more of this! What can it avail, except to make you suffer 
greater things? Follow the counsels of your own conscience. 
You have been true to them hitherto; it is not for me, or 
through me, that you shall ever be turned aside from them.” 

A bitter sigh broke from him as he heard. 

“ They are noble words. And yet it is so easy to utter, so 
hard to follow them. If you had one thought of tenderness 
for me, you -could not speak them.” 

A flush passed over her face. 


ORDEAL BY FIRE. 551 

“ Do not think me without feeling — without sympathy — 
pity ” 

“ These are not love.” 

She was silent; they were, in a sense, nearer to love than 
any emotion she had ever known. 

“ If you loved me,” he pursued passionately — “ ah, God ! the 
very word from me to you sounds insult; and yet there is not 
one thought in me that does not honor you — if you loved me. 
could you stand there and bid me drag on this life forever; 
nameless, friendless, hopeless; having all the bitterness, but 
none of the torpor of death; wearing out the doom of a galley 
slave, though guiltless of all crime ? ” 

“Why speak so? You are unreasoning. A moment ago you 
implored me not to tempt you to the violation of what you hold 
your honor; because I bid you be faithful to it, you deem me 
cruel ! ” 

“ Heaven help me ! I scarce know what I say. I ask you, if 
you were a woman who loved me, could you decide thus ? ” 

“ These are wild questions,” she murmured ; “ what can they 
serve? I believe that I should — I am sure that I should. As 
it is — as your friend ” 

“Ah, hush! Friendship is crueller than hate.” 

“ Cruel?” 

“Yes; the worst cruelty when we seek love — a stone proffered 
us when we ask for bread in famine ! ” 

There was desperation, almost ferocity, in the answer; she 
was moved and shaken by it — not to fear, for fear was not in 
her nature, but to something of awe, and something of the 
despairing hopelessness that was in him. 

“ Lord Royallieu,” she said slowly, as if the familiar name 
were some tie between them, some cause of excuse for these, 
the only love words she had ever heard without disdain and 
rejection — “ Lord Royallieu, it is unworthy of you to take 
this advantage of an interview which I sought, and sought for 
your own sake. You pain me, you wound me. I cannot tell 
how to answer you. You speak strangely, and without war- 
rant.” 

He stood mute and motionless before her, his head sunk on 
his chest. He knew that she rebuked him justly; he knew that 
he had broken through every law he had prescribed himself, 
and that he had sinned against that code of chivalry which 
should have made her sacred from such words while they were 


552 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


those he could not utter, nor she hear, except in secrecy and 
shame. Unless he could stand justified in her sight and in that 
of all men, he had no right to seek to wring out tenderness 
from her regret and from her pity. Yet all his heart went out 
to her in one irrepressible entreaty. 

“Forgive me, for pity’s sake! After to-night I shall never 
look upon your face again.” 

“ I do forgive,” she said gently, while her voice grew very 
sweet. “You endure too much already for one needless pang 
to be added by me. All I wish is that you had never met me, 
so that this last, worst thing had not come unto you ! ” 

A long silence fell between them; where she leaned back 
among her cushions, her face was turned from him. He stood 
motionless in the shadow, his head still dropped upon his breast, 
his breathing loud and slow and hard. To speak of love to her 
was forbidden to him, yet the insidious temptation wound 
closer and closer round his strength. He had only to betray 
the man he had sworn to protect, and she would know his in- 
nocence, she would hear his passion; he would be free, and she 
— he grew giddy as the thought rose before him — she might, 
with time, be brought to give him other tenderness than that 
of friendship. . He seemed to touch the very supremacy of joy; 
to reach it almost with his hand; to have honors, and peace, 
and all the glory of her haughty loveliness, and all the sweet- 
ness of her subjugation, and all the soft delights of passions 
before him in their golden promise, and he was held back in 
bands of iron, he was driven out from them desolate and ac- 
cursed. 

Unlike Cain, he had suffered in his brother’s stead, yet, like 
Cain, he was branded and could only wander out into the dark- 
ness and the wilderness. 

She watched him many minutes, he unconscious of her gaze ; 
and while she did so, many conflicting emotions passed over 
the colorless delicacy of her features; her eyes were filled and 
shadowed with many altering thoughts; her heart was waking 
from its rest, and the high, generous, unselfish nature in her 
strove with her pride of birth, her dignity of habit. 

“Wait,” she said softly, with the old imperial command of 
her voice subdued, though not wholly ‘banished. “ I think you 
have mistaken me somewhat. You wrong me if you think that 
I could be so callous, so indifferent, as to leave you here with- 
out heed as to your fate. Believe in your innocence you know 


ORDEAL BY FIRE. 


553 


that I do, as firmly as though you substantiated it with a 
thousand proofs; reverence your devotion to your honor you 
are certain that I must, or all better things were dead in me.” 

Her voice sank inaudible for the instant; she recovered her 
self-control with an effort. 

“ You reject my friendship — you term it cruel — but at least 
it will be faithful to you; too faithful for me to pass out of 
Africa and never give you one thought again. I believe in you. 
Do you not know that that is the highest trust, to my thinking, 
that one human life can show in another’s? You decide that 
it is your duty not to free yourself from this bondage, not to 
expose the actual criminal, not to take up your rights of birth. 
I dare not seek to alter that decision. But I cannot leave you 
to such a future without infinite pain, and there must — there 
shall be — means through which you will let me hear of you — 
through which, at least, I can know that you are living.” 

She stretched her hands toward him with that same gesture 
with which she had first declared her faith in his guiltlessness; 
the tears trembled in her voice and swam in her eyes. As she 
had said, she suffered for him exceedingly. He, hearing those 
words which breathed the only pity that had never humiliated 
him, and the loyal trust which was but the truer because the 
sincerity of faith in lieu of the insanity of love dictated it, 
made a blind, staggering, unconscious movement of passionate, 
dumb agony. He seized her hands in his and held them close 
against his breast one instant, against the loud, hard panting 
of his aching heart. 

“ God reward you ! God keep you ! If I stay, I shall tell you 
all. Let me go, and forget that we ever met! I am dead — let 
me be dead to you ! ” 

With another instant he had left the tent and passed out 
into the red glow of the torchlit evening. And Venetia Corona 
dropped her proud head down upon the silken cushions where 
his own had rested, and wept as women weep over their dead — 
in such a passion as had never come to her in all the course of 
her radiant, victorious, and imperious life. 

It seemed to her as if she had seen him slain in cold blood, 
and had never lifted her hand or her voice against his murder. 

His voice rang in her ear; his face was before her with its 
white, still, rigid anguish; the burning accents of his avowal 
of love seemed to search her very heart. If this man perished 
in any of the thousand perils of war she would forever feel 


554 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


herself his assassin. She had his secret, she had his soul, she 
had his honor in her hands; and she could do nothing better 
for them both than to send him from her to eternal silence, to 
eternal solitude! 

Her thoughts grew unbearable; she rose impetuously from 
her couch and paced to and fro the narrow confines of her 
tent. Her tranquillity was broken down; her pride was aban- 
doned; her heart, at length, was reached and sorely wounded. 
The only man she had ever found, whom it would have been 
possible to her to have loved, was one already severed from 
her by a fate almost more hideous than death. 

And yet, in her loneliness, the color flushed back into her 
face; her eyes gathered some of their old light; one dreaming, 
shapeless fancy floated vaguely through her mind. 

If, in the years to come, she knew him in all ways worthy, 
and learned to give him back this love he bore her, it was in 
her to prove that love, at no matter what cost to her pride and 
her lineage. If his perfect innocence were made clear in her 
own sight, there was greatness and there was unselfishness 
enough in her nature to make her capable of regarding alone 
his martyrdom and his heroism, and disregarding the opinion 
of the world. If, hereafter, she grew to find his presence the 
necessity of her life, and his sacrifice of that nobility and of 
that purity she now believed it, she — proud as she was with 
the twin pride of lineage and of nature — would be capable of 
incurring the odium and the marvel of all who knew her by 
uniting her fate to his own, by making manifest her honor 
and her tenderness for him, though men saw in him only a 
soldier of the empire, only a base-born trooper, beneath her as 
Riom beneath the daughter of D’Orleans. She was of a brave 
nature, of a great nature, of a daring courage, and of a superb 
generosity. Abhorring dishonor, full of glory in the stainless 
history of her race, and tenacious of the dignity and of the 
magnitude of her House, she yet was too courageous and too. 
haughty a woman not to be capable of braving calumny, if 
conscious of her own pure rectitude beneath it ; not to be capa- 
ble of incurring false censure, if enoountered in the path of 
justice and of magnanimity. It was possible, even on herself 
it dawned as possible, that so great might become her compas- 
sion and her tenderness for this man that she would, in some 
distant future, when the might of his love and the severity of 
his suffering should prevail with her, say to him: 


ORDEAL BY FIRE. 


555 


“ Keep your secret from the world as you will. Prove your 
innocence only to me; let me and the friend of your youth 
-alone know your name and your rights. And knowing all, 
knowing you myself to be hero and martyr in one, I shall not 
care what the world thinks of you, what the world says of me. 
I will be your wife; I have lands, and riches, and honors, and 
greatness enough to suffice for us both.” 

If ever she loved him exceedingly, she would become capable 
of this sacrifice from the strength, and the graciousness, and 
the fearlessness of her nature, and such love was not so distant 
irom her as she thought. 

Outside her tent there was a peculiar mingling of light and 
shadow; of darkness from the moonless and now cloud-covered 
sky, of reddened warmth from the tall, burning pine-boughs 
thrust into the soil in lieu of other illumination. The atmos- 
phere was hot from the flames, and chilly with the breath of 
the night winds; it was oppressively still, though from afar 
off the sounds of laughter in the camp still echoed, and near 
at hand the dull and steady tramp of the sentinels fell on the 
hard, parched soil. Into that blended heat and cold, dead 
blackness and burning glare, he reeled out from her presence; 
■drunk with pain as deliriously as men grow drunk with raki. 
The challenge rang on the air: 

“ Who goes there ? ” 

He never heard it. Even the old, long-accustomed habits 
•of a soldier’s obedience were killed in him. 

“ Who goes there ? ” the challenge rang again. 

Still he never heard, but went on blindly. From where the 
tents stood there was a stronger breadth of light through which 
he had passed, and was passing still — a light strong enough 
for it to be seen whence he came, but not strong enough to 
show his features. 

“Halt, or I fire!” The sentinel brought. the weapon to his 
shoulder and took a calm, close, sure aim. He did not speak; 
the password he had forgotten as though he. had never heard 
or never given it. 

Another figure than that of the soldier on guard came out 
of the shadow, and stood between him and the sentinel. It was 
that of Chateauroy; he was mounted on his gray horse and 
wrapped in his military cloak, about to go the round of the 
•cavalry camp. Their eyes met in the wavering light like the 


556 UNDER TWO FLAGS. 

glow from a furnace-mouth: in a glance they knew each 
other. 

“ It is one of my men,” said the chief carelessly to the senti- 
nel. “ Leave me to deal with him.” 

The guard saluted, and resumed his beat. 

“ Why did you refuse the word, sir ? ” 

“ I did not hear.” 

“ And why did you not hear ? ” 

There was no reply. 

“ Why are you absent from your squadron ? ” 

There was no reply still. 

“ Have you no tongue, sir ? The matraque shall soon make 
you sp'eak ! Why are you here ? ” 

There was again no answer. 

Chateauroy’s teeth ground out a furious oath; yet a flash of 
brutal delight glittered in his eyes. At last he had hounded 
down this man, so long out of his reach, into disobedience and 
contumacy. 

“ Why are you here, and where have you been ? ” he demanded 
once more. 

u I will not say.” 

The answer, given at length, was tranquil, low, slowly and dis- 
tinctly uttered, in a deliberate refusal, in a deliberate defiance. 

The dark and evil countenance above him grew livid with 
fury. 

“ I can have you thrashed like a dog for that answer, and 
I will. But first listen here, beau sire! I know as well as 
though you had confessed to me. Your silence cannot shelter 
your great mistress’ shame. Ah, ha! la Faustine! So Mme. 
votre Princesse is so cold to her equals, only to choose her 
lovers out of my blackguards, and take her midnight intrigues 
like a camp courtesan ! ” 

Cecil’s face changed terribly as the vile words were spoken. 
With the light and rapid spring of a leopard, he reached the 
side of his commander, one hand on the horse’s mane, the other 
on the wrist of his chief, that it gripped like an iron vise. 

“You lie! And you know that you lie. Breathe her name 
once more, and, by God, as we are both living men, I will have 
your life for your outrage ! ” 

Aijd, as he spoke, with his left hand he smote the lips that 
had blasphemed against her. 

It was broken asunder at last — all the long and bitter pa- 



Photo by Byron 







ORDEAL BY FIRE. 


557 


tience, all the calm and resolute endurance, all the undeviating 
serenity beneath provocation, which had never yielded through 
twelve long years, but which had borne with infamy and with 
tyranny with such absolute submission for sake of those 
around him, who would revolt at his sign and be slaughtered 
for his cause. The promise he had given to endure all things 
for their sakes — the sakes of his soldiery, of his comrades — was 
at last forgotten. All he remembered was the vileness that 
dared touch her name, the shame that through him was 
breathed on her. Rank, duty, bondage, consequence, all were 
forgotten in that one instant of insult that mocked in its odious 
lie at her purity. He was no longer the soldier bound in obedi- 
ence to submit to the indignities that his chief chose to heap 
on him; he was a gentleman who defended a woman’s honor, 
a man who avenged a slur on the life that he loved. 

Chateauroy wrenched his wrist out of the hold that crushed 
it, and drew his pistol. Cecil knew that the laws of active serv- 
ice would hold him but justly dealt with if the shot laid him 
dead in that instant for his act and his words. 

“You can kill me — I know it. Well, use your prerogative; 
it will be the sole good you have ever done to me.” 

And he stood erect, patient, motionless, looking into his 
chief’s eyes with a calm disdain, with an unuttered challenge 
that, for the first moment, wrung something of savage respect 
and of sullen admiration out from the soul of his great 
foe. 

He did not fire; it was the only time in which any trait of 
abstinence from cruelty had been ever seen in him. He signed 
to the soldiers of the guard with one hand, while with the 
other he still covered with his pistol the man whom martial law 
would have allowed him to have shot down, or have cut down, 
at his horse’s feet. 

“ Arrest him,” he said simply. 

Cecil offered no resistance ; he let them seize and disarm him 
without an effort at the opposition which could have been but 
a futile, unavailing trial of brute force. He dreaded lest there 
should be one sound that should reach her in that tent where 
the triad of standards drooped in the dusky distance. He had 
been, moreover, too long beneath the yoke of that despotic and 
irresponsible authority to waste breath or to waste dignity in 
vain contest with the absolute and the immutable. He was 
content with what he had done — content to have met once, 


558 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


not as soldier to chief, but as man to man, the tyrant who held 
his fate. 

For once, beneath the spur of that foul outrage to the dignity 
and the innocence of the woman he had quitted, he had al- 
lowed a passionate truth to force its way through the barriers 
of rank and the bonds of subservience. Insult to himself he had 
borne as the base prerogative of his superior, but insult to her 
he had avenged with the vengeance of equal to equal, of the 
man who loved on the man who calumniated her. 

And as he sat in the darkness of the night with the heavy 
tramp of his guards forever on his ear, there was peace rather 
than rebellion in his heart — the peace of one heartsick with 
strife and with temptation, who beholds in death a merciful 
ending to the ordeal of existence. “ I shall die in her cause 
at least,” he thought. “ I could be content if I were only sure 
that she would never know.” 

For this was the chief dread which hung on him, that she 
should ever know, and in knowing, suffer for his sake. 

The night rolled on, the army around him knew nothing of 
what had happened. Chateauroy, conscious of his own coarse 
guilt against the guest of his Marshal, kept the matter uniold 
and undiscovered, under the plea that he desired not to destroy 
the harmony of the general rejoicing. The one or two field- 
officers with whom he took counsel agreed to the wisdom of 
letting the night pass away undisturbed. The accused was the 
idol of his own squadron; there was no gauge what might not 
be done by troops heated with excitement and drunk with wine, 
if they knew that their favorite comrade had set the example 
of insubordination, and would be sentenced to suffer for it. 
Beyond these, and the men employed in his arrest and guard, 
none knew what had chanced; not the soldiery beneath that 
vast sea of canvas, many of whom would have rushed headlong 
to mutiny and to destruction at his word; not the womaji who 
in the solitude of her wakeful hours was haunted by the mem- 
ory of his love-words, and felt steal on her the unacknowledged 
sense that, if his future were left to misery, happiness could 
never more touch her own; not the friend of his early days, 
laughing and drinking with the officers of the staff. 

None knew; not even Cigarette. She sat alone, so far away 
that none sought her out, beside the picket-fire that had long 
died out, with the little white dog of Zaraila curled on the 
scarlet folds of her skirt. Her arms rested on her knees, and 


ORDEAL BY FIRE. 


559 


her temples leaned on her hands tightly twisted among the 
dark, silken curls of her boyish hair. Her face had the same 
dusky, savage intensity upon it; and she never once moved 
from that rigid attitude. 

She had the Cross on her heart — the idol of her long desire, 
the star to which her longing eyes had looked up ever since 
her childhood through the reek of carnage and the smoke of 
battle; and she would have flung it away like dross, to have 
had his lips touch hers once with love. 

“ Que je suis folle! ” she muttered in her throat; “ que je suis 
f olle ! ” 

And she knew herself mad; for the desires and the delights 
of love die swiftly, but the knowledge of honor abides always. 
Love would have made her youth sweet with an unutterable 
gladness, to glide from her and leave her weary, dissatisfied, 
forsaken. But that Cross, the gift of her country, the symbol 
of her heroism, would be with her always, and light her forever 
with the honor of which it was the emblem; and if her life 
should last until youth passed away, and age came, and with 
age death, her hand would wander to it on her dying bed, and 
she would smile, as she died, to hear the living watchers mur- 
mur : “ That life had glory — that life was lived for F ranee.” 

She knew this; but she was young; she was a woman-child; 
she had the ardor of passionate youth in her veins, she had the 
desolation of abandoned youth in her heart. And honor looked 
so cold beside love! 

She rose impetuously; the night was far spent, the camp 
was very still, the torches had long died out, and a streak of 
dawn was visible in the east. She stood a while, looking very 
earnestly across the wide, black city of tents. 

“ I shall be best away for a time. I grow mad, treacherous, 
wicked here,” she thought. “ I will go and see Blanc-Bec.” 

Blanc-Bec w T as the soldier of the Army of Italy. 

In a brief while she had saddled and bridled Etoile-Filante, 
and ridden out of the camp without warning or farewell to 
any; she was as free to come and to go as though she were a 
bird on the wing. Thus she went, knowing nothing of his fate. 
And with the sunrise went also the woman whom he loved — in 
ignorance. 


CHAPTEK XXXVI. 


THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE. 

The warm, transparent light of an African autumnal noon 
shone down through the white canvas roof of a great tent in 
the heart of the encamped divisions at the headquarters of the 
Army of the South. In the tent there was a densely packed 
throng — an immense, close, hushed, listening crowd, of which 
every man wore the uniform of France, of which the mute, 
undeviating attention, forbidden by discipline alike to be 
broken by sound of approval or dissent, had in it something- 
that was almost terrible, contrasted with the vivid eagerness 
in their eyes and the strained absorption of their countenances ; 
for they were in court, and that court was the Conseil de 
Guerre of their own southern camp. 

The prisoner was arraigned on the heaviest charge that can 
be laid against the soldier of any army, and yet, as the many 
eyes of the military crowd turned on him where he stood sur- 
rounded by his guard, his crime against his chief was forgotten, 
and they only remembered — Zaraila. 

Many of those present had seen him throughout that day of 
blood, at the head of his decimated squadron, with the guidon 
held aloft above every foe; to them that tall, slender form 
standing there, with a calm, weary dignity, that had nothing 
of the passion of the mutinous or the consciousness of the 
criminal in its serene repose, had shed upon it the luster of 
a heroism that made them ready almost to weep like women 
that the death of a mutineer should be the sole answer given 
by France to the savior of her honor. 

He preserved entire reticence in court. The instant the acte 
d’accusation had been read to him, he had seen that his chief 
would not dare to couple with it the proud, pure name he had 
dared to outrage; his most bitter anxiety was thus at an end. 
For all the rest, he was tranquil. 

Xo case could be clearer, briefer, less complex, more entirely 
incapable of defense. The soldiers of the guard gave evidence 
as to the violence and fury of the assault. The sentinel bore 

560 




THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE. 561 


witness to having heard the refusal to reply; a moment after, he 
had seen the attack made and the blow given. The accuser 
merely stated that, meeting his sous-officier out of the bounds 
of the cavalry camp, he had asked him where he had been, and 
why he was there, and, on his commanding an answer, had 
been assaulted in the manner described, with violence sufficient 
to have cost his life had not the guard been so near at hand. 
When questioned as to*what motive he could assign for the act, 
he replied that he considered his corporal had always incited 
evil feeling and mutinous conduct in the squadrons, and had, 
he believed, that day attributed to himself his failure to receive 
the Cross. The statement passed without contradiction by the 
prisoner, who, to the interrogations and entreaties of his legal 
defenseur, only replied that, the facts were stated accurately 
as they occurred, and that his reasons for the deed he declined 
to assert. 

When once more questioned as to his country and his past 
by the president, he briefly declined to give answer. When 
asked if the names by which he was enrolled were his own, he 
replied that they were two of his baptismal names, which had 
served his purpose on entering the army. When asked if he 
accepted as true the charge of exciting sedition among the 
troops, he replied that it was so little true that, over and over 
again, the men would have mutinied if he had given them a 
sign, and that he had continually induced them to submit to 
discipline sheerly by force of his own example. When inter- 
rogated as to the cause of the language he had used to his com- 
manding officer, he said briefly that the language deserved the 
strongest censure as from a soldier to his colonel, but that it 
was justified as he had used it, which was as man to man, 
though he was aware the plea availed nothing in military law, 
and was impermissible for the safety of the service. When it 
was inquired of him if he had not repeatedly inveighed against 
his commanding officer for severity, he briefly denied it; no 
man had ever heard him say a syllable that could have been con- 
strued into complaint; at the same time, he observed that all 
the squadrons knew perfectly well personal enmity and op- 
pression had been shown him by his chief throughout the whole 
time of his association with the regiment. When pressed as to 
the cause that he assigned for this, he gave, in a few compre- 
hensive outlines, the story of the capture and the deliverance 
of the Emir’s bride; this was all that could be elicited from 


562 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


him; and even this was answered only out of deference to the 
authority of the court, and from his unwillingness, even now, 
to set a bad example before the men with whom he had served 
so long. When it was finally demanded of him if he had aught 
to urge in his own extenuation, he paused a moment, with a 
gaze under which even the hard, eagle eyes grew restless, looked 
across to Chateauroy, and addressed his antagonist rather than 
the president. 

“ Only this : that a tyrant, a liar, and a traducer cannot 
wonder if men prefer death to submission beneath insult. But 
I am well aware this is no vindication of my act as a soldier, 
and I have no desire to say words which, whatever their truth, 
might become hereafter dangerous legacies, and dangerous prec- 
edents to the army.” 

That was all which he answered, and neither his counsel nor 
his accusers could extort another syllable from him. 

He knew that what he had done was justified to his own con- 
science, but he did not seek to dispute that it was unjustifiable 
in military law. True, had all been told, it was possible enough 
that his judges would exonerate him morally, even if they con- 
demned him legally ; his act would be seen blameless as a man’s, 
even while still punishable as a soldier’s; but to purchase im- 
munity for himself at the cost of bringing the fairness of her 
fame into the coarse babble of men’s tongues was an alternative, 
craven and shameful, which never even once glanced across his 
thoughts. 

He had kept faith to a woman whom he had known heart- 
less and well-nigh worthless; it was not to the woman whom 
he loved with all the might of an intense passion, and whom 
he knew pure and glorious as the morning sun, that he would 
break his faith now. 

All through the three days that the conseil sat his look and 
his manner never changed — the first was quite calm, though 
very weary; the latter courteous, but resolute, with the un- 
changed firmness of one who knew his own past action justified. 
For the rest, many noticed that, during the chief of the long, 
exhausting hours of his examination and his trial, his thoughts 
seemed far away, and he appeared to recall them to the present 
with difficulty, and with nothing of the vivid suspense of an 
accused, whose life and death swung in the judgment-balance. 

In truth, he had no dread as he had no hope left; he knew 
well enough that by the blow which had vindicated her honor 


THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE. 


563 


he had forfeited his own existence. All he wished was that 
his sentence had been dealt without this formula of debate and 
of delay, which could have issue but in one end. There was 
not one man in court who was not more moved than he, more 
quick to terror and regret for his doom. To many among his 
comrades who had learned to love the gentle, silent “ aristo- 
crat,” who bore every hardship so patiently, and humanized 
them so imperceptibly by the simple force of an unvaunted 
example, those three days were torture. Wild, brutal brigands, 
whose year was one long razzia of plunder, rapine, and 
slaughter, felt their lips tremble like young girls’ when they 
asked how the issue went for him; and the blood-stained ma- 
rauders, who thought as little of assassination for a hidden pot 
of gold as butchers of drawing a knife across a sheep’s throat, 
grew still and fear-stricken' with a great awe when the mutter- 
ing passed through the camp that they would see no more 
among their ranks that “woman’s face” which they had be- 
held so often foremost in the fight, with a look on it that thrilled 
their hearts like their forbidden chant of the Marseillaise. For 
when the third day closed, they knew that he must die. 

There were men, hard as steel, ravenous of blood as vultures, 
who, when they heard that sentence given, choked great, deep 
sobs down into the cavernous depths of their broad, seared, 
sinewy breasts; but he never gave sigh or sign. He never 
moved once while the decree of death was read to him; and 
there was no change in the weary calmness of his eyes. He 
bent his head in acquiescence. 

“ C’est bien ! ” he said simply. 

It seemed well to him. Dead, his secret would lie in the grave 
with him, and the long martyrdom of his life be ended. 

In the brightness of the noon Cigarette leaned out of her 
little oval casement that framed her head like an old black 
oak carving — a head with the mellow bloom on its cheeks, and 
the flash of scarlet above its dark curls, and the robin-like 
grace of poise and balance as it hung out there in the sun. 

Cigarette had been there a whole hour in thought; she who 
never had wasted a moment in meditation or reverie, and who 
found the long African day all too short for her busy, abundant, 
joyous life, that was always full of haste and work, just as a 
bird’s will seem so, though the bird have no more to do than 
to fly at its will through summer air, and feed at its will from 


564 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


brook and from berry, from a ripe ear of the com or from a 
deep cup of the lily. For the first time she was letting time 
drift away in the fruitless labor of vain, purposeless thought, 
because, for the first time also, happiness was not with 
her. 

They were gone forever — all the elastic joyance, all the free, 
fair hours, all the dauntless gayety of childhood, all the sweet, 
harmonious laughter of a heart without a care. They were 
gone forever; for the touch of love and of pain had been laid 
on her; and never again would her radiant eyes smile cloud- 
lessly, like the young eagle’s, at a sun that rose but to be greeted 
as only youth can greet another dawn of life that is without 
a shadow. 

And she leaned wearily there, with her cheek lying on the 
cold, gray Moorish stone; the color and the brightness were in 
the rays of the light, in the rich hues of her hair and her 
mouth, in the scarlet glow of her dress ; there was no brightness 
in her face. The eyes were vacant as they watched the green 
lizard glide over the wall beyond, and the lips were parted with 
a look of unspeakable fatigue; the tire, not of the limbs, but of 
the heart. She had come thither, hoping to leave behind her on 
the desert wind that alien care, that new, strange passion, which 
sapped her strength, and stung her pride, and made her evil 
with such murderous lust of vengeance; and they were with 
her still. Only something of the deadly, biting ferocity of jeal- 
ousy had changed into a passionate longing to be as that 
woman was who had his love; into a certain hopeless, sicken- 
ing sense of having forever lost that which alone could have 
given her such beauty and such honor in the sight of men as 
those this woman had. 

To her it seemed impossible that this patrician who had his 
passion should not return it. To the child of the camp, though 
she often mocked at caste, all the inexorable rules, all the ret- 
icent instincts of caste, were things unknown. She would have 
thought love could have bridged over any gulf ; she would have 
failed to comprehend all the thousand reasons which would have 
forbidden any bond between the great aristocrat and a man 
of low grade and of dubious name. She only thought of love 
as she had always seen it, quickly born, hotly cherished, wildly 
indulged, and without tie or restraint. 

“ And I came without my vengeance ! ” she mused. To the 
nature that felt the ferocity of the vendetta a right and a due, 



Photo by Byron 









THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE. 


565 


there was wounding humiliation in her knowledge that she had 
left her rival unharmed, and had come hither, out from his 
sight and his presence, lest he should see in her one glimpse 
of that folly which she would have killed herself under her 
own steel rather than have been betrayed, either for his con- 
tempt or his compassion. 

“ And I came without my vengeance ! ” she mused ; in that 
oppressive noon, in that gray and lonely place, in that lofty 
tower-solitude, where there was nothing between her and the 
hot, hard, cruel blue of the heavens, vengeance looked the only 
thing that was left her; the only means whereby that void in 
her heart could be filled, that shame in her life be washed out. 
To love! and to love a man who had no love for her, whose eyes 
only beheld another’s face, whose ears only thirsted for an- 
other’s voice! Its degradation stamped her a traitress in her 
own sight — traitress to her code, to her pride, to her country, 
to her flag! 

And yet, at the core of her heart so tired a pang was aching ! 
She who had gloried in being the child of the whole people, 
the daughter of the whole army, felt lonely and abandoned, as 
though she were some bird which an hour ago had been flying 
in all its joy among its brethren, and now, maimed with one 
shot, had fallen, with broken pinion and torn plumage, to lie 
alone upon the sand and die. 

The touch of a bird’s wing brushing her hair brought the 
dreamy comparison to her wandering thoughts. She started 
and lifted her head; it was a blue carrier-pigeon, one of the 
many she fed at that casement, and the swiftest and surest of 
several she sent with messages for the soldiers between the 
various stations and corps. She had forgotten she had left the 
bird at the encampment. 

She caressed it absently, while the tired creature sank down 
on her bosom ; then only she saw that there was a letter beneath 
one wing. She unloosed it, and looked at it without being able 
to tell its meaning; she could not read a word, printed or 
written. Military habits were too strong with her for the ar- 
rival not to change her reverie into action; whoever it was for, 
it must be seen. She gave the pigeon water and grain, then 
wound her way down the dark, narrow stairs, through the height 
of the tower, out into the passage below. 

She found an old French cobbler sitting at a stall in a case- 
ment, stitching leather ; he was her customary reader and scribe 


566 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


in this quarter. She touched him with the paper. “ Bon 
Mathieu ! wilt thou read this to me ? ” 

“ It is for thee, Little One, and signed ‘ Petit Pot-de-terre.’ ” 
Cigarette nodded listlessly. 

“ ’Tis a good lad, and a scholar,” she answered absently. 
“ Read on!” 

And he read aloud : 


“ ‘ There is ill news. I send the bird on a chance to find thee. 
Bel-a-faire-peur struck the Black Hawk — a light blow, but with 
threat to kill following it. He has been tried, and is to be shot. 
There is no appeal to the Conseil de Revision. The case is 
clear; the Colonel could have cut him down, were that all. I 
thought you should know. We are all sorry. It was done on 
the night of the great fete. I am thy humble lover and slave.’ ” 


So the boy-Zouave’s scrawl, crushed, and blotted, and written 
with great difficulty, ran in its brief phrases that the slow mut- 
tering of the old shoemaker drew out in tedious length. 

Cigarette heard ; she never made a movement or gave a sound, 
but all the blood fled out of her brilliant face, leaving it horri- 
bly blanched beneath its brown sun-scorch; and her eyes — dis- 
tended, senseless, sightless — were fastened on the old man’s 
slowly moving mouth. 

“ Read it again ! ” she said simply, when all was ended. He 
started, and looked up at her face ; the voice had not one accent 
of its own tones left. 

He obeyed, and read it once more to the end. Then a loud, 
shuddering sigh escaped her, like the breath of one stifling 
under flames. 

“ Shot ! ” she said vacantly. “ Shot ! ” 

Her vengeance had come without her once lifting her hand 
to summon it. 

The old man rose hurriedly. 

“Child! art thou ill?” 

“ The blow was struck for her ! ” she muttered. “ It was that 
night, you hear — that night ! ” 

“ What night ? Thou lookest so strangely ! Dost thou love 
this doomed soldier ? ” 

Cigarette laughed — a laugh whose echo thrilled horribly 
through the lonely Moresco courtway. 


THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE. 567 


“ Love ? love ? I hated him, look you ! So I said. And I 
longed for my vengeance. It is come ! ” 

She was still a moment ; her white, parched mouth quivering 
as though she were under physical torture, her strained eyes 
fastened on the empty air, the veins in her throat swelling and 
throbbing till they glowed to purple. Then she crushed the 
letter in one hand, and flew, fleet as any antelope, through the 
streets of the Moorish quarter, and across the city to the quay. 

The people ever gave way before her; but now they scattered 
like frightened sheep from her path. There was something that 
terrified them in that bloodless horror set upon her face, and in 
that fury of resistless speed with which she rushed upon her 
way. 

Once only in her headlong career through the throngs she 
paused; it was as one face, on which the strong light of the 
noontide poured, came before her. The senseless look changed 
in her eyes; she wheeled out of her route, and stopped before 
the man who had thus arrested her. He was leaning idly over 
the stall of a Turkish bazaar, and her hand grasped his arm 
before he saw her. 

“You have his face?” she muttered. “What are you to 
him ? ” 

He made no answer; he was too amazed. 

“ You are of his race,” she persisted. “ You are brethren by 
your look. What are you to him ? ” 

“ To whom? ” 

“To the man who calls himself Louis Victor? a Chasseur 
of my army ? ” 

Her eyes were fastened entirely on him; keen, ruthless, 
fierce, in this moment as a hawk’s. He grew pale and mur- 
mured an incoherent denial. He sought to shake her off, first 
gently, then more rudely; he called her mad, and tried to fling 
her from him; but the lithe fingers only wound themselves 
closer on his arm. 

“ Be still — fool ! ” she muttered ; and there was that in the 
accent that lent a strange force and dignity in that moment 
to the careless and mischievous plaything of the soldiery — force 
that overcame him, dignity that overawed him. “ You are of 
his people; you have his eyes, and his look, and his features. 
He disowns you, or you him. Ho matter which. He is of your 
blood; and he lies under sentence of death. Do you know 
that ? ” 


568 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


With a stifled cry the other recoiled from her; he never 
doubted that she spoke the truth; none could who had looked 
upon her face. 

“ Do not lie to me,” she said curtly. “ It ayails you nothing. 
Read that.” 

She thrust before him the paper the pigeon had brought; 
his hand trembled sorely as he held it; he believed in that mo- 
ment that this strange creature — half soldier, half woman, half 
brigand, half child — knew all his story and all his shame from 
his brother. 

“ Shot ! ” he echoed hoarsely, as she had done, when he had 
read on to the end. “ Shot ! Oh, my God ! and I ” 

She drew him out of the thoroughfare into a dark recess 
within the bazaar,, he submitting unresistingly. He was filled 
with the horror, the remorse, the overwhelming shock of his 
brother’s doom. 

“ He will be shot,” she said with a strange calmness. “We 
shoot down many men in our army. I know him well. He was 
justified in his act, I do not doubt; but discipline will not stay 
for that ” 

“ Silence, for mercy’s sake ! Is there no hope — no possi- 
bility?” 

Her lips were parched like the desert sand as her dry, hard 
words came through them. “Hone. His chief could have cut 
him down on the instant. It took place in camp. You feel this 
thing ; you are of his race, then ? ” 

“ I am his brother ! ” 

She was silent ; looking at him fixedly, it did not seem to her 
strange that she should thus have met one of his blood in the 
crowds of Algiers. She was absorbed in the one catastrophe 
whose hideousness seemed to eat her very life away, even while 
her nerve, and her brain, and her courage remained at their 
keenest and strongest. 

“ You are his brother,” she said slowly, so much as an af- 
firmation that his belief was confirmed that she had learned 
both their relationship and their history from Cecil. “You 
must go to him, then.” 

He shook from head to foot. 

“ Yes, yes ! But it will be too late ! ” 

She did not know that the words were cried out in all the 
contrition of an unavailing remorse; she gave them only their 
literal significance, and shuddered as she answered him. 






















































































































































THE VENGEANCE 01 THE LITTLE ONE. 569 


“ That you must risk. You must go to him. But, first, I 
must know more. Tell me his name, his rank.” 

He was silent; coward and egotist though he was, both 
cowardice and egotism were killed in him under the overwhelm- 
ing horror with which he felt himself as truly by moral guilt 
a fratricide as though he had stabbed his elder through the 
heart. 

“ Speak ! ” hissed Cigarette through her clinched teeth. “ If 
you have any kindness, any pity, any love for the man of your 
blood, who will be shot there like a dog, do not waste a second 
— answer me, tell me all.” 

He turned his wild, terrified glance upon her; he had in 
that moment no sense but to seize some means of reparation, 
to declare his brother’s rights, to cry out to the very stones of 
the streets his own wrong and his victim’s sacrifice. 

“ He is the head of my house ! ” he answered her, scarce 
knowing what he answered. “ He should bear the title that I 
bear now. He is here, in this misery, because he is the most 
merciful, the most generous, the most long-suffering of living 
souls ! If he die, it is not they who have killed him ; it is I ! ” 

She listened, with her face set in that stern, fixed, resolute 
command which never varied ; she neglected all that wonder, or 
curiosity, or interest would have made her as at any other time, 
she only heeded the few great facts that bore upon the fate of 
the condemned. 

“ Settle with yourself for that sin,” she said bitterly. “ Your 
remorse will not save him. But do the thing that I bid you, 
if that remorse be sincere. Write me out here that title you 
say he should bear, and your statement that he is your brother, 
and should be the chief of your house; then sign it, and give 
it to me.” 

He seized her hands, and gazed with imploring eyes into her 
face. 

“ Who are you ? What are you ? If you have the power to 
do it, for the love of God rescue him! It is I who have mur- 
dered him — I — who have let him live on in this hell for my 
sake ! ” 

“ For your sake ! ” 

She flung his hands off her and looked him full in the face; 
that glance of the speechless scorn, the unutterable rebuke of 
the woman-child who would herself have died a thousand deaths 
rather than have purchased a whole existence by a single false- 


570 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


hood or a single cowardice, smote him like a blow, and avenged 
his sin more absolutely than any public chastisement. The 
courage and the truth of a girl scorned his timorous fear and 
his living lie. His head sank, he seemed to shrink under her 
gaze; his act had never looked so vile to him as it looked now. 

She gazed a moment longer at him with her mute and won- 
dering disdain that there should be on earth a male life capa- 
ble of such fear and of such ignominy as this. Then the strong 
and rapid power in her took its instant ascendency over the 
weaker nature. 

“ Monsieur, I do not know your story ; I do not want. I 
am not used to men who let others suffer for them. What I 
want is your written statement of your brother’s name and 
station; give it me.” 

He made a gesture of consent; he would have signed away 
his soul, if he could, in the stupor of remorse which had seized 
him. She brought him pens and paper from the Turk’s store, 
and dictated what he wrote: 

“ I hereby affirm that the person serving in the Chasseurs 
d’Afrique under the name of Louis Victor is my elder brother, 
Bertie Cecil, lawfully, by inheritance, the Viscount Royallieu, 
Peer of England. I hereby also acknowledge that I have suc- 
ceeded to and borne the title illegally, under the supposition of 
his death. 

(Signed) 

“Berkeley Cecil.” 

He wrote it mechanically; the force of her will and the tor- 
ture of his own conscience driving him, on an impulse, to undo 
in an instant the whole web of falsehood that he had let cir- 
cumstance weave on and on to shelter him through twelve long 
years. He let her draw the paper from him and fold it away 
in her belt. He watched her with a curious, dreamy sense of 
his own impotence against the fierce and fiery torrent of her 
bidding. 

“ What is it you will do ? ” he asked her. 

“ The best that shall lie in my power. Do you the same.” 

“ Can his life yet be saved ? ” 

“His honor may — his honor shall.” 

Her face had an exceeding beauty as she spoke; though it 
was stern and rigid still, a look that was sublime gleamed over 


THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE. 571 

it. She, the waif and stray of a dissolute camp, knew better 
than the scion of his own race how the doomed man would 
choose the vindication of his honor before the rescue of his life. 
He laid his hand on her as she moved. 

“ Stay ! — stay ! One word ” 

She flung him off her again. 

“ This is no time for words. Go to him — coward! — and let 
the balls that kill him reach you too, if you have one trait of 
manhood left in you ! ” 

Then, swiftly as a swallow darts, she quitted him and flew 
on her headlong way, down through the pressure of the people, 
and the throngs of the marts, and the noise, and the color, and 
the movement of the streets. 

The sun was scarce declined from its noon before she rode 
out of the city, on a half-bred horse of the Spahis, swift as 
the antelope and as wild, with her only equipment some pistols 
in her holsters, and a bag of rice and a skin of water slung at 
her saddle-bow. 

They asked her where she went; she never answered. The 
hoofs struck sharp echoes out of the rugged stones, and the 
people were scattered like chaff as she went at full gallop down 
through Algiers. Her comrades, used to see her ever with some 
song in the air and some laugh on the lips as she went, looked 
after her with wonder as she passed them, silent, and with her 
face white and stern as though the bright, brown loveliness of 
it had been changed to alabaster. 

“ What is it with the Cigarette ? ” they asked each other. 
Hone could tell; the desert horse and his rider flew by them 
as a swallow flies. The gleam of her Cross and the colorless 
calm of the childlike face that wore the resolve of a Napoleon’s 
on it were the last they ever saw of Cigarette. 

All her fluent, untiring speech was gone — gone with the rose 
hue from her cheek, with the laugh from her mouth, with the 
child’s joyance from her heart; but the brave, stanch, daunt- 
less spirit lived with a soldier’s courage, with a martyr’s pa- 
tience. 

And she rode straight through the scorch of the midday sun, 
along the sea-coast westward. The dizzy swiftness would have 
blinded most who should have been carried through the dry 
air and under the burning skies at that breathless and pause- 
less speed; but she had ridden half -maddened colts with the 
skill of Arabs themselves; she had been tossed on a holster 


572 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


from her earliest years, and had clung with an infant's hands in 
fearless glee to the mane of roughriders’ chargers. She never 
swerved, she never sickened; she was borne on and on against 
the hard, hot currents of the cleft air with only one sense — that 
she went so slowly, so slowly, when with every beat of the ring- 
ing hoofs one of the few moments of a doomed life fled away! 

She had a long route before her; she had many leagues to 
travel, and there were but four-and-twenty hours, she knew well, 
left to the man who was condemned to death. Four-and-twenty 
hours left open for appeal — no more — betwixt the delivery and 
execution of the sentence. That delay was always interpreted 
by the French Code as a delay extending from the evening of 
one day to the dawn of the second day following; and some 
slight interval might then ensue, according as the general in 
command ordained. But the twenty-four hours was all of 
which she could be certain; and even of them some must have 
flown by since the carrier-pigeon had been loosed to her. She 
could not tell how long he had to live. 

There were fifty miles between her and her goal; Abd-el- 
Kader’s horse had once covered that space in three hours, so 
men of the Army of D’Aumale had told her; she knew what 
they had done she could do. Once only she paused, to let her 
horse lie a brief while, and cool his foam-flaked sides, and crop 
some short, sweet grass that grew where a cleft of water ran 
and made the bare earth green. She sat quite motionless while 
he rested; she was keenly alive to all that could best save his 
strength and further her travel; but she watched him during 
those few minutes of rest and inaction with a fearful look of 
hunger in her eyes — the worst hunger — that which craves Time 
and cannot seize it fast enough. Then she mounted again, and 
again went on, on her flight. 

She swept by cantonments, villages, soldiers on the march, 
douairs of peaceful Arabs, strings of mules and camels, cara- 
vans of merchandise; nothing arrested her; she saw nothing 
that she passed, as she rode over the hard, dust-covered, shad- 
owless roads; over the weary, sun-scorched, monotonous coun- 
try; over the land without verdure and without foliage, the 
land that yet has so weird a beauty, so irresistible a fascination ; 
the land to which men, knowing that death waits for them in it, 
yet return with as mad an infatuation as her lovers went back 
across the waters to Circe. 

The horse was reeking with smoke and foam, and the blood 


THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE. 573 


was coursing from his flanks, as she reached her destination at 
last, and threw herself off his saddle as he sank, faint and quiv- 
ering, to the ground. Whither she had come was to a fortress 
where the Marshal of France, who was the Viceroy of Africa, 
had arrived that day in his progress of inspection throughout 
the provinces. Soldiers clustered round her eagerly beneath 
the gates and over the fallen beast; a thousand questions pour- 
ing from their curious tongues. She pointed to the animal 
with one hand, to the gaunt pile of stone that bristled with 
cannon with the other. • 

“ Have a care of him ; and lead me to the chief ! ” 

She spoke quietly; but a certain sensation of awe and fear 
moved those who heard. She was not the Child of the Army 
whom they knew so well. She was a creature, desperate, hard- 
pressed, mute as death, strong as steel; above all, hunted by 
despair. 

They hesitated to take her message, to do her bidding. The 
one whom she sought was great and supreme here as a king; 
they dreaded to approach his staff, to ask his audience. 

Cigarette looked at them a moment, then loosened her Cross 
and held it out to an adjutant standing beneath the gates. 

“ Take that to the man who gave it me. Tell him Cigarette 
waits; and with each moment that she waits a soldier’s life is 
lost. Go!” 

The adjutant took it, and went. Over and over again she 
had brought intelligence of an Arab movement, news of a con- 
templated razzia, warning of an internal revolt, or tidings of 
an encounter on the plains, that had been of priceless value to 
the army which she served. It was not lightly that Cigarette’s 
words were ever received when she spoke as she spoke now; nor 
was it impossible that she now brought to them that which 
would brook neither delay nor trifling. 

She waited patiently; all the iron discipline of military life 
had never bound her gay and lawless spirit down; but now she 
was singularly still and mute. Only there gleamed thirstily in 
her eyes that fearful avarice which begrudges every moment in 
its flight as never the miser grudged his hoarded gold into the 
robber’s grasp. 

A few minutes and the decoration was brought back to her, 
and her demand granted. She was summoned to the Marshal’s 
presence. She was taken within the casemate of the fortress. 
It was the ordnance room, a long, vast, silent chamber filled 


574 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


with stands of arms, with all the arts and appliances of war 
brought to their uttermost perfection, and massed in all the 
resource of a great empire against the sons of the desert, who 
had nothing to oppose to them save the despair of a perishing 
nationality and a stifled freedom. 

The Marshal, leaning against a brass field-piece, turned to 
her with a smile in his keen, stem eyes. 

“ You, my young decoree ! What brings you here? ” 

She came up to him with her rapid leopard-like grace, and 
he started as he saw the change upon her features. She was 
covered with sand and dust, and with the animal’s blood- 
flecked foam. The beating of her heart from the fury of the 
gallop had drained every hue from her face; her voice was 
scarcely articulate in its breathless haste as she saluted 
him. 

“ Monseigneur, I have come from Algiers since noon ” 

“ F rom Algiers ! ” He and his officers echoed the name of the 
city in incredulous amaze ; they knew how far from them down 
along the sea-line the white town lay. 

“ Since noon, to rescue a life — the life of a great soldier, of a 
guiltless man. He who saved the honor of France at Zaraila 
is to die the death of a mutineer at dawn ! ” 

“ What ! — your Chasseur ? ” 

A dusky, scarlet fire burned through the pallor of her face; 
but her eyes never quailed, and the torrent of her eloquence 
returned under the pangs of shame that were beaten back under 
the noble instincts of her love. 

“Mine! — since he is a soldier of France; yours, too, by that 
title. I am come here, from Algiers, to speak the truth in his 
name, and to save him for his own honor and the honor of my 
Empire. See here ! At noon, I have this paper, sent by a swift 
pigeon. Read it! You see how he is to die, and why. Well, 
by my Cross, by my Flag, by my France, I swear that not a 
hair of his head shall be touched, not a drop of blood in his 
veins shall be shed ! ” 

He looked at her, astonished at the grandeur and the courage 
which could come on this child of razzias and revelries, and 
give to her all the splendor of a fearless command of some 
young empress. But his face darkened and set sternly as he 
read the paper ; it was the greatest crime in the sight of a proud 
soldier, this crime against discipline, of the man for whom she 
pleaded. 


THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE. 575 

“ You speak madly,” he said, with cold brevity. “ The of- 
fense merits the chastisement. I shall not attempt to interfere.” 

“Wait! you will hear, at least. Monseigneur?” 

“ I will hear you — yes, but I tell you, once for all, I never 
change sentences that are pronounced by conseils de guerre; 
and this crime is the last for which you should attempt to 
plead for mercy with me.” 

“ Hear me, at least ! ” she cried, with passionate ferocity — 
the ferocity of a dumb animal wounded by a shot. “ You do 
not know what this man is — how he has had to endure; I do. 
I have watched him; I have seen the brutal tyranny of his 
chief, who hated him because the soldiers loved him. I have 
seen his patience, his obedience, his long-suffering beneath in- 
sults that would have driven any other to revolt and murder. I 
have seen him — I have told you how — at Zaraila, thinking never 
of death or life, only of our Flag, that he has made his own, 
and under which he has been forced to lead the life of a galley 
slave ” 

“ The finer soldier he be, the less pardonable his offense.” 

“ That I deny ! If he were a dolt, a brute, a thing of wood, 
as many are, he would have no right to vengeance; as it is, 
he is a gentleman, a hero, a martyr; may he not forget for 
one hour that he is a slave? Look you! I have seen him so 
tried that I told him — I, who love my army better than any 
living thing under the sun — that I would forgive him if he 
forgot duty and dealt with his tyrant as man to man. And he 
always held his soul in patience. Why? Not because he feared 
death — he desired it; but because he loved his comrades, and 
suffered in peace and in silence lest, through him, they should 
be led into evil ” 

His eyes softened as he heard her ; but the inflexibility of his 
voice never altered. 

“ It is useless to argue with me,” he said briefly ; “ I never 
change a sentence.” 

“ But I say that you shall ! ” As the audacious words were 
flung forth, she looked him full in the eyes, while her voice 
rang with its old imperious oratory. “You are a great chief; 
you are as a monarch here ; you hold the gifts and the grandeur 
of the Empire ; but, because of that — because you are as France 
in my eyes — I swear, by the name of France, that you shall 
see justice done to him; after death, if you cannot in life. Do 
you know who he is — this man whom his comrades will shoot 


576 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


down at sunrise as they shoot down the murderer and the rav- 
isher in their crimes ? ” 

“ He is a rebellious soldier ; it is sufficient.” 

“ He is not ! He is a man who vindicated a woman’s honor ; 
he is a man who suffers in a brother’s place; he is an aristocrat 
exiled to a martyrdom; he is a hero who has never been greater 
than he will be great in his last hour. Read t*hat ! What you 
refuse to justice, and mercy, and courage, and guiltlessness, 
you will grant, maybe, to your Order.” 

She forced into his hand the written statement of Cecil’s 
name and station. All the hot blood was back in her cheek, all 
the fiery passion back in her eyes. She lashed this potent ruler 
with the scourge of her scorn as she had lashed a drunken 
horde of plunderers with her whip. She was reckless of what 
she said; she was conscious only of one thing — the despair that 
consumed her. 

The French Marshal glanced his eye on the fragment, care- 
lessly and coldly. As he saw the words, he started, and read on 
with wondering eagerness. 

“ Royallieu ! ” he muttered — “ Royallieu ! ” 

The name was familiar to him; he it was who, when he had 
murmured, “ That man has the seat of the English Guards,” 
as a Chasseur d’Afrique had passed him, had been ignorant that 
in that Chasseur he saw one whom he had known in many a 
scene of Court splendor and Parisian pleasure. The years had 
been many since Cecil and he had met, but not so many but 
that the name brought memories of friendship with it, and 
moved him with a strange emotion. 

He turned with grave anxiety to Cigarette. 

“You speak strangely. How came this in your hands?” 

“ Thus : the day that you gave me the Cross, I saw Mme. la 
Princesse Corona. I hated her, and I went — no matter ! From 
her I learned that he whom we call Louis Victor was of her 
rank, was of old friendship with her house, was exiled and 
nameless, but for some reason unknown to her. She needed 
to see him; to bid him farewell, so she said. I took the mes- 
sage for her; I sent him to her.” Her voice grew husky and 
savage, but she forced her words on with the reckless sacrifice 
of self that moved her. “ He went to her tent, alone, at night ; 
that was, of course, whence he came when Chateauroy met 
him. I doubt not the Black Hawk had some foul thing to 
hint of his visit, and that the blow was struck for her — for her ! 


THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE. 577 

Well; in the streets of Algiers I saw a man with a face like 
his own ; different, but the same race, look you. I spoke to him ; 
I taxed him. When he found that the one whom I spoke of 
was under sentence of death, he grew mad; he cried out that 
he was his brother and had murdered him — that it was for his 
sake that the cruelty of this exile had been borne — that, if his 
brother perished, he would be his destroyer. Then I bade him 
write down that paper, since these English names were un- 
known to me, and I brought it hither to you that you might 
see, under his hand and with your own eyes, that I have ut- 
tered the truth. And now, is that man to be killed like a mad 
beast whom you fear? Is that death the reward France will 
give for Zaraila ? ” 

Her eyes were fixed with a fearful intensity of appeal upon 
the stern face bent over her; her last arrow was sped; if this 
failed, all was over. As he heard, he was visibly moved; he 
remembered the felon’s shame that in years gone by had fallen 
across the banished name of Bertie Cecil; the history seemed 
clear as crystal to him, seen beneath the light shed on it from 
other days. 

His hand fell heavily on the gun-carriage. 

“ Mort de Dieu ! it was his brother’s sin, not his ! ” 

There was a long silence; those present, who knew nothing 
of all that was in his memory, felt instinctively that some 
dead weight of alien guilt was lifted off a blameless life 
forever. 

She drew a deep, long, sighing breath; she knew that he was 
safe. Her hands unconsciously locked on the great chief’s 
arms; her eyes looked up, senselessly in their rapture and their 
dread, to his. 

“ Quick, quick ! ” she gasped. “ The hours go so fast ; while 
we speak here he ” 

The words died in her throat. The Marshal swung around 
with a rapid sign to a staff officer. 

“ Pens and ink ! instantly ! My brave child, what can we 
say to you? I will send an aid to arrest the execution of the 
sentence. It must be deferred till we know the whole truth of 
this. If it be as it looks now, he shall be saved if the Empire 
can save him ! ” 

She looked up in his eyes with a look that froze his very 
heart. 

“ His honor ! ” she muttered ; “ his honor — if not his life ! ” 


578 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


He understood her; he bowed his haughty head low down 
to hers. 

“ True. We will cleanse that, if all other justice be too late.” 

The answer was infinitely gentle, infinitely solemn. Then 
he turned and wrote his hurried order, and bade his aid go with 
it without a second’s loss. But Cigarette caught it from his 
hand. 

“To me ! to me ! Ho other will go so fast ! ” 

“ But, my child, you are worn out already.” 

She turned on him her beautiful, wild eyes, in which the 
blinding, passionate tears were floating. 

“ Do you think I would tarry for that ? Ah ! I wish that I 
had let them tell me of God, that I might ask Him now to bless 
you! Quick, quick! Lend me your swiftest horse! one that 
will not tire. And send a second order by your aid-de-camp; 
the Arabs may kill me as I go, and then they will not know ! ” 

He stooped and touched her little, brown, scorched, feverish 
hand with reverence. 

“ My child, Africa has shown me much heroism, but none like 
yours. If you fall, he shall be safe, and France will know how 
to avenge its darling’s loss.” 

She turned and gave him one look, infinitely sweet, infinitely 
eloquent. 

“Ah, France!” she said, so softly that the last word was 
but a sigh of unutterable tenderness. The old, imperishable 
early love was not dethroned ; it was there, still before all else. 
France was without rival with her. 

Then, without another second’s pause, she flew from them, 
and vaulting into the saddle of a young horse which stood 
without in the court-yard, rode once more, at full speed out 
into the pitiless blaze of the sun, out to the wasted desolation 
of the plains. 

The order of release, indeed, was in her bosom; but the 
chances were as a million to one that she would reach him with 
it in time, ere with the rising of the sun his life would have 
set forever. 

All the horror of remorse was on her ; to her nature the bitter 
jealousy in which she had desired vengeance on him seemed 
to have rendered her a murderess. She loved him — loved him 
with an exceeding passion; and only in this extremity, when 
it was confronted with the imminence of death, did the fullness 
and the greatness of that love make their way out of the petu- 


THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE. 


579 


lant pride and the wounded vanity which had obscured them. 
She had been ere now a child and a hero; beneath this blow 
which struck at him she changed — she became a woman and a 
martyr. 

And she rode at full speed through the night, as she had 
done through the daylight, her eyes glancing all around in the 
keen instinct of a trooper, her hand always on the butt of her 
belt pistol. For she knew well what the danger was of these 
lonely, unguarded, untraveled leagues that yawned in so vast 
a distance between her and her goal. The Arabs, beaten, but 
only rendered furious by defeat, swept down on to those plains 
with the old guerrilla skill, the old marvelous rapidity. She 
knew that with every second shot or steel might send her reel- 
ing from her saddle ; that with every moment she might be sur- 
rounded by some desperate band who would spare neither her 
sex nor her youth. But that intoxication of peril, the wine- 
draught she had drunk from her infancy, was all which sus- 
tained her in that race with death. It filled her veins with 
their old heat, her heart with its old daring, her nerves with 
their old matchless courage ; but for it she would have dropped, 
heart-sick with terror and despair, ere her errand could be done ; 
under it she had the coolness, the keenness, the sagacity, the 
sustained force, and the supernatural strength of some young 
hunted animal. They might slay her, so that she left perforce 
her mission unaccomplished; but no dread of such a fate had 
even an instant's power to appall her or arrest her. While there 
should be breath in her, she would go on to the end. 

There were eight hours' hard riding before her, at the swift- 
est pace her horse could make; and she was already worn by 
the leagues already traversed. Although this was nothing new 
that she did now, yet as time flew on and she flew with it, cease- 
lessly, through the dim, solitary, barren moonlit land, her brain 
now and then grew giddy, her heart now and then stood still 
with a sudden numbing faintness. She shook the weakness 
off her with the resolute scorn for it of her nature, and suc- 
ceeded in its banishment. They had put in her hand, as she 
had passed through the fortress gates, a lance with a lantern 
muffled in Arab fashion, so that the light was unseen from be- 
fore, while it streamed over her herself, to enable her to guide 
her way if the moon should be veiled by clouds. With that 
single, starry gleam aslant on a level with her eyes, she rode 
through the ghastly twilight of the half-lit plains; now flooded 


580 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


with luster as the moon emerged, now engulfed in darkness as 
the stormy western winds drove the cirrhi over it. But neither 
darkness nor light differed to her; she noted neither; she was 
like one drunk with strong wine, and she had but one dread — 
that the power of her horse would give way under the unnatural 
strain made on it, and that she would reach too late, when the 
life she went to save would have fallen forever, silent unto 
death, as she had seen the life of Marquise fall. 

Hour on hour, league on league, passed away; she felt the 
animal quiver under the spur, and she heard the catch in his 
panting breath as he strained to give his fleetest and best, that 
told her how, ere long, the racing speed, the extended gallop 
at which she kept him, would tell, and beat him down, despite 
his desert strain. She had no pity; she would have killed 
twenty horses under her to reach her goal. She was giving her 
own life, she was willing to lose it, if by its loss she did this 
thing, to save even the man condemned to die with the rising 
of the sun. She did not spare herself; and she would have 
spared no living thing, to fulfill the mission that she undertook. 
She loved with the passionate blindness of her sex, with the 
absolute abandonment of the southern blood. If to spare him 
she must have bidden thousands fall, she would have given 
the word for their destruction without a moment’s pause. 

Once, from some screen of gaunt and barren rock, a shot was 
fired at her, and flew within a hair’s breadth of her brain; she 
never even looked around to see whence it had come; she knew 
it was from some Arab prowler of the plains. Her single spark 
of light through the half-veiled lantern passed as swiftly as 
a shooting-star across the plateau. And as she felt the hours 
steal on — so fast, so hideously fast — with that horrible relent- 
lessness, “ ohne hast, ohne rast,” which tarries for no despair, 
as it hastens for no desire, her lips grew dry as dust, her tongue 
clove to the roof of her mouth, the blood beat like a thousand 
hammers on her brain. 

What she dreaded came. 

Midway in her course, when, by the stars, she knew midnight 
was passed, the animal strained with hard-drawn, panting gasps 
to answer the demand made on him by the spur and by the 
lance-shaft with which he was goaded onward. In the lantern 
light she saw his head stretched out in the racing agony, his 
distended eyeballs, his neck covered with foam and blood, his 
heaving flanks that seemed bursting with every throb that his 


THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE. 581 


heart gave; she knew that, half a league more forced from him, 
he would drop like a dead thing never to rise again. She let 
the bridle drop upon the poor beast’s neck, and threw her arms 
above her head with a shrill, wailing cry, whose despair echoed 
over the noiseless plains like the cry of a shot-stricken animal. 
She saw it all: the breathing of the rosy, golden day; the still- 
ness of the hushed camp; the tread of the few picked men; the 
open coffin by the open grave; the leveled carbines gleaming in 
the first rays of the sun. . . She had seen it so many times — 
seen it to the awful end, when the living man fell down in the 
morning light a shattered, senseless, soulless, crushed-out mass. 

That single moment was all the soldier’s nature in her gave 
to the abandonment of despair, to the paralysis that seized her. 
With that one cry from the depths of her breaking heart, the 
weakness spent itself; she knew that action alone could aid 
him. She looked across, southward and northward, east and 
west, to see if there were aught near from which she could get 
aid. If there were none, the horse must drop down to die, and 
with his life the other life would perish as surely as the sun 
would rise. 

Her gaze, straining through the darkness, broken here and 
there by fitful gleams of moonlight, caught sight in the distance 
of some yet darker thing, moving rapidly — a large cloud skim- 
ming the earth. She let the horse, which had paused the in- 
stant the bridle had touched his neck, stand still a while, and 
kept her eyes fixed on the advancing cloud till, with the mar- 
velous surety of her desert-trained vision, she disentangled it 
from the floating mists and wavering shadows, and recognized 
it, as it was, a band of Arabs. 

If she turned eastward out of her route, the failing strength 
of her horse would be fully enough to take her into safety from 
their pursuit, or even from their perception, for they were com- 
ing straightly and swiftly across the plain. If she were seen 
by them, she was certain of her fate; they could only be the 
desperate remnant of the decimated tribes, the foraging raiders 
of starving and desperate men, hunted from refuge to refuge, 
and carrying fire and sword in their vengeance wherever an 
unprotected caravan or a defenseless settlement gave them the 
power of plunder and of slaughter, that spared neither age nor 
sex. She was known throughout the length and the breadth of 
the land to the Arabs; she was neither child nor woman to 
them; she was but the soldier who had brought up the French 


582 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


reserve at Zaraila; she was but the foe who had seen them 
defeated, and ridden down with her comrades in their pursuit 
in twice a score of vanquished, bitter, intolerably shameful 
days. Some among them had sworn by their God to put her 
to a fearful death if ever they made her captive, for they held 
her in superstitious awe, and thought the spell of the Frankish 
successes would be broken if she were slain. She knew that; 
yet, knowing it, she looked at their advancing band one mo- 
ment, then turned her horse’s head and rode straight toward 
them. 

“ They will kill me, but that may save him,” she thought. 
“ Any other way he is lost.” 

So she rode directly toward them; rode so that she crossed 
their front, and placed herself in their path, standing quite still, 
with the cloth torn from the lantern, so that its light fell full 
about her, as she held it above her head. In an instant they 
knew her. They were the remnant who had escaped from the 
carnage of Zaraila ; they knew her with all the rapid, unerring 
surety of hate. They gave the shrill, wild war-shout of their 
tribe, and the whole mass of gaunt, dark, mounted figures with 
their weapons whirling round their heads inclosed her; a cloud 
of kites settled down with their black wings and cruel beaks 
upon one young silvery-plumed gerfalcon. 

She sat unmoved, and looked up at the naked blades that 
flashed above her; there was no fear upon her face, only a calm, 
resolute, proud beauty — very pale, very still in the light that 
gleamed on it from the lantern rays. 

“ I surrender,” she said briefly ; she had never thought to 
say these words of submission to her scorned foes; she would 
not have been brought to utter them to spare her own existence. 
Their answer was a yell of furious delight, and their bare blades 
smote each other with a clash of brutal joy. They had her, the 
Frankish child who had brought shame and destruction on 
them at Zaraila, and they longed to draw their steel across the 
fair young throat, to plunge their lances into the bright, bare 
bosom, to twine her hair round their spear handles, to rend her 
delicate limbs apart, as a tiger rends the antelope, to torture, 
to outrage, to wreak their vengeance on her. Their chief, only, 
motioned their violence back from her, and bade them leave 
her untouched. At him she looked still with the same fixed, 
serene, scornful resolve ; she had encountered these men so often 
in battle, she knew so well how rich a prize she was to him. 


THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE. 583 


But she had one thought alone with her; and for it she sub- 
dued contempt, and hate, and pride, and every passion in 
her. 

“ I surrender,” she said, with the same tranquillity. “ I have 
heard that you have sworn by your God and your Prophet to 
tear me limb from limb because that I — a child, and a woman- 
child — brought you to shame and to grief on the day of Zaraila. 
Well, I am here; do it. You can slake your will on me. But 
that you are brave men, and that I have ever met you in fair 
fight, let me speak one word with you first.” 

Through the menaces and the rage around her, fierce as the 
yelling of starving wolves around a frozen corpse, her clear, 
brave tones reached the ear of the chief in the lingua sabir that 
she used. He was a young man, and his ear was caught by that 
tuneful voice, his eyes by that youthful face. He signed up- 
ward the swords of his followers, and motioned them back as 
their arms were stretched to seize her, and their shouts clamored 
for her slaughter. 

“ Speak on,” he said briefly to her. 

“ You have sworn to take my body, sawn in two, to Ben- 
Ihreddin ? ” she pursued, naming the Arab leader whom her 
Spahis had driven off the field of Zaraila. “Well, here it is; 
you can take it to him; and you will receive the piasters, 
and the horse, and the arms that he has promised to who- 
soever shall slay me. I have surrendered; I am yours. But 
you are bold men, and the bold are never mean; therefore, 
I will ask one thing of you. There is a man yonder, in my 
camp, condemned to death with the dawn. He is innocent. I 
have ridden from Algiers to-day with the order of his release. 
If it is not there by sunrise he will be shot; and he is guiltless 
as a child unborn. My horse is worn out; he could not go 
another half league. I knew that, since he had failed, my com- 
rade would perish, unless I found a fresh beast or a messenger 
to go in my stead. I saw your band come across the plain. I 
knew that you would kill me, because of your oath and of your 
Emir’s bride; but I thought that you would have greatness 
enough in you to save this man who is condemned, without 
crime, and who must perish unless you, his foes, have pity on 
him. Therefore I came. Take the paper that frees him; send 
your fleetest and surest with it, under a flag of truce, into our 
camp by the dawn; let him tell them there that I, Cigarette, 
gave it him. He must say no word of what you have done to 


584 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


me, or his white flag will not protect him from the vengeance 
of my army — and then receive your reward from your chief, 
Ben-lhreddin, when you lay my head down for his horse’s hoofs 
to trample into the dust. Answer me — is the compact fair? 
Ride on with this paper northward, and then kill me with what 
torments you choose.” 

She spoke with calm, unwavering resolve, meaning that which 
she uttered to its very uttermost letter. She knew that these 
men had thirsted for her blood; she offered it to be shed to gain 
for him that messenger on whose speed his life was hanging. 
She knew that a price was set upon her head ; but she delivered 
herself over to the hands of her enemies so that thereby she 
might purchase his redemption. 

As they heard, silence fell upon the brutal, clamorous herd 
around — the silence of amaze and of respect. The young chief 
listened gravely; by the glistening of his keen, black eyes, he 
was surprised and moved, though, true to his teaching, he 
showed neither emotion as he answered her. 

“ Who is this Frank for whom you do this thing? ” 

“ He is the warrior to whom you offered life on the field of 
Zaraila because his courage was as the courage of gods.” 

She knew the qualities of the desert character; knew how to 
appeal to its reverence and to its chivalry. 

“ And for what does he perish ? ” he asked. 

u Because he forgot for once that he was a slave ; and because 
he has borne the burden of a guilt that was not his own.” 

They were quite still now, closed around her; these ferocious 
plunderers, who had been thirsty a moment before to sheathe 
their weapons in her body, were spellbound by the sympathy of 
courageous souls, by some vague perception that there was a 
greatness in this little tigress of France, whom they had sworn 
to hunt down and slaughter, which surpassed all they had 
known or dreamed. 

“ And you have given yourself up to us that, by your death, 
you may purchase a messenger from us for this errand ? ” pur- 
sued their leader. He had been reared as a boy in the high 
tenets and the pure chivalries of the school of Abd-el-Kader ; 
and they were not lost in him, despite the crimes and the 
desperation of his life. 

She held the paper out to him, with a passionate entreaty 
breaking through the enforced calm of despair with which she 
had hitherto spoken. 


THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE. 585 


“ Cut me in ten thousand pieces with your swords, but save 
him, as you are brave men, as you are generous foes ! ” 

With a single sign of his hand their leader waved them back 
where they crowded around her, and leaped down from his 
saddle, and led the horse he had dismounted to her. 

“ Maiden,” he said gently, “ we are Arabs, but we are not 
brutes. We swore to avenge ourselves on an enemy; we are 
not vile enough to accept a martyrdom. Take my horse — he 
is the swiftest of my troop — and go you on your errand. You 
are safe from me.” 

She looked at him in stupor; the sense of his words was not 
tangible to her; she had had no hope, no thought, that they 
would ever deal thus with her; all she had ever dreamed of was 
so to touch their hearts and their generosity that they would 
spare one from among their troop to do the errand of mercy 
she had begged of them. 

“You play with me!” she murmured, while her lips grew 
whiter and her great eyes larger in the intensity of her emo- 
tion. “ Ah ! for pity’s sake, make haste and kill me, so that, 
this only may reach him ! ” 

The chief, standing by her, lifted her up in his sinewy arms, 
up on to the saddle of his charger. His voice was very solemn, 
his glance was very gentle; all the nobility of the highest Arab 
nature was aroused in him at the heroism of a child, a girl, an 
infidel — one, in his sight abandoned and shameful among her 
sex. 

“ Go in peace,” he said simply ; “ it is not with such as thee 
that we war.” 

Then, and then only, as she felt the fresh reins placed in 
her hand, and saw the ruthless horde around her fall back and 
leave her free, did she understand his meaning; did she com- 
prehend that he gave her back both liberty and life, and, with 
the surrender of the horse he loved, the noblest and most 
precious gift that the Arab ever bestows or ever receives. The 
unutterable joy seemed to blind her, and gleam upon her face 
like the blazing light of noon, as she turned her burning eyes 
full on him. 

“ Ah ! now I believe that thine Allah rules thee, equally with 
Christians ! If I live, thou shalt see me back ere another night ; 
if I die, France will know how to thank thee ! ” 

“We do not do the thing that is right for the sake that men 
may recompense us,” he answered her gently. “Fly to thy 


586 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


friend, and hereafter do not judge that those who are in arms 
against thee must needs be as the brutes that seek out whom 
they shall devour.” 

Then, with one word in his own tongue, he bade the horse 
bear her southward, and, as swiftly as a spear launched from his 
hand, the animal obeyed him and flew across the plains. He 
looked after a while, through the dim, tremulous darkness that 
seemed cleft by the rush of the gallop as the clouds are cleft 
by lightning, while his tribe sat silent on their horses in moody, 
unwilling consent; savage in that they had been deprived of 
prey, moved in that they were sensible of this martyrdom which 
had been offered to them. 

“ Verily the courage of a woman has put the best among us 
unto shame,” he said, rather to himself than them, as he 
mounted the stallion brought him from the rear and rode slowly 
northward; unconscious that the thing he had done was great, 
because conscious only that it was just. 

And, borne by the fleetness of the desert-bred beast, she went 
away through the heavy, bronze-hued dullness of the night. 
Her brain had no sense, her hands had no feeling, her eyes had 
no sight ; the rushing of waters was loud on her ears, the giddi- 
ness of fasting and of fatigue sent the gloom eddying round 
and round like a whirlpool of shadow. Yet she had remem- 
brance enough left to ride on, and on, and on without once 
flinching from the agonies that racked her cramped limbs and 
throbbed in her beating temples; she had remembrance enough 
to strain her blind eyes toward the east and murmur, in her 
terror of that white dawn, that must soon break, the only 
prayer that had been ever uttered by the lips no mother’s kiss 
had ever touched: 

“ O God ! keep the day back ! ” 


CHAPTER XXXVII. 


IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY. 

There was a line of light in the eastern sky. The camp was 
very still. It was the hour for the mounting of the guard, and, 
as the light spread higher and higher, whiter and whiter, as 
the morning came, a score of men advanced slowly and in si- 
lence to a broad strip of land screened from the great encamp- 
ment by the rise and fall of the ground, and stretching far and 
even, with only here and there a single palm to break its sur- 
face, over which the immense arc of the sky bent, gray and 
serene, with only the one colorless gleam eastward that was 
changing imperceptibly into the warm, red flush of opening day. 

Sunrise and solitude: they were alike chosen, lest the army 
that honored, the comrades that loved him, should rise to his 
rescue; casting off the yoke of discipline, and remembering 
only that tyranny and that wretchedness under which they had 
seen him patient and unmoved throughout so many years of 
servitude. 

He stood tranquil beside the coffin within which his broken 
limbs and shot-pierced corpse would so soon be laid forever. 
There was a deep sadness on his face, but it was perfectly 
serene. To the words of the priest who approached him he 
listened with respect, though he gently declined the services 
of the Church. He had spoken but very little since his arrest; 
he was led out of the camp in silence and waited in silence 
now, looking across the plains to where the dawn was growing 
richer and brighter with every moment that the numbered sec- 
onds of his life drifted slowly and surely away. 

When they came near to bind the covering over his eyes, he 
motioned them away, taking the bandage from their hands and 
casting it far from him. 

“ Did I ever fear to look down the depths of my enemies’ 
muskets ? ” 

It was the single outbreak, the single reproach, that escaped 
from him — the single utterance by which he ever quoted his 
services to France. Not one who heard him dared again force 

587 


588 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


on him that indignity which would have blinded his sight, as 
though he had ever dreaded to meet death. 

That one protest having escaped from him, he was once more 
still and calm, as though the vacant grave yawning at his feet 
had been but a couch of down to rest his tired limbs. His eyes 
watched the daylight deepen, and widen, and grow into one 
sheet of glowing roseate warmth ; but there was no regret in the 
gaze; there was a fixed, fathomless resignation that moved with 
a vague sense of awe those who had come to slay him, and who 
had been so used to slaughter that they fired their volley into 
their comrade’s breast as callously as into the ranks of their 
antagonists. 

“ It is best thus,” he thought, “ if only she never knows ” 

Over the slope of brown and barren earth that screened the 
camp from view there came, at the very moment that the ram- 
rods were drawn out with a shrill, sharp ring from the carbine- 
barrels, a single figure — tall, stalwart, lithe, with the spring of 
the deerstalker in its rapid step, and the sinew of the northern 
races in its mold. 

Cecil never saw it ; he was looking at the east, at the deepen- 
ing of the morning flush that was the signal of his slaughter, 
and his head was turned away. 

The newcomer went straight to the adjutant in command, and 
addressed him with brief preface, hurriedly and low. 

“ Your prisoner is Victor of the Chasseurs? — he is to be shot 
this morning ? ” 

The officer assented ; he suffered the interruption, recogniz- 
ing the rank of the speaker. 

“ I heard of it yesterday ; I rode all night from Oran. I feel 
great pity for this man, though he is unknown to me,” the 
stranger pursued, in rapid, whispered words. “ His crime 
was ” 

“ A blow to his colonel, monseigneur.” 

“ And there is no possibility of a reprieve ? ” 

“ None.” 

“May I speak with him an instant? I have heard it said 
that he is of my country, and of a rank above his standing in 
his regiment here.” 

“You may address him, M. le Due; but be brief. Time 

presses.” 

He thanked the officer for the unusual permission, and turned 
to approach the prisoner. At that moment Cecil turned also* 


IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY. 589 

and their eyes met. A great, shuddering cry broke from them 
both; his head sank as though the bullets had already pierced 
his breast, and the man who believed him dead stood gazing at 
him, paralyzed with horror. 

For a moment there was an awful silence. Then the Seraph’s 
voice rang out with a terror in it that thrilled through the care- 
less, callous hearts of the watching soldiery. 

“ Who is that man ? He died — he died so long ago ! And 
yet ” 

Cecil’s head was sunk on his chest; he never spoke, he never 
moved; he knew the helpless, hopeless misery that waited for 
the one who found him living only to find him also standing 
beside his open grave. He saw nothing; he only felt the crush- 
ing force of his friend’s arms flung round him, as though seizing 
him to learn whether he were a living man or a spector dreamed 
of in delirium. 

“ Who are you ? Answer me, for pity’s sake ! ” 

As the swift, hoarse, incredulous words poured on his ear, 
he, not seeking to unloose the other’s hold, lifted his head and 
looked full in the eyes that had not met his own for twelve long 
years. In that one look all was uttered; the strained, eager, 
doubting eyes that read their answer in it needed no other. 

“You live still! Oh! thank God — thank God!” 

And as the thanksgiving escaped him, he forgot all save the 
breathless joy of this resurrection; forgot that at their feet the 
yawning grave was open and unfilled. Then, and only then, 
under that recognition of the friendship that had never failed 
and never doubted, the courage of the condemned gave way, 
and his limbs shook with a great shiver of intolerable torture; 
and at the look that came upon his face, the look of dumb, 
brute-like anguish, the man who loved him remembered all — 
Temembered that he stood there in the morning light only to be 
shot down like a beast of prey. Holding him there still with 
that strong pressure of his sinewy hands, he swore a great oath 
that rolled like thunder down the hard, keen air. 

“ You! perishing here! If they send their shots through you, 
they shall reach me first in their passage! O Heaven! Why 
have you lived like this ? Why have you been lost to me, if you 
were dead to all the world beside ? ” 

They were the words that his sister had spoken. Cecil’s white 
lips quivered as he heard them ; his voice was scarcely audible as 
it panted through them. 


590 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


“I was accused ” 

“ Aye ! But by whom ? Not by me ! Never by me ! ” 

Cecil’s eyes filled with slow, blinding tears; tears sweet as 
a woman’s in her joy, bitter as a man’s in his agony. He knew 
that in this one heart at least no base suspicion ever had har- 
bored; he knew that this love,* at least, had cleaved to him 
through all shame and against all evil. 

“ God reward you!” he murmured. “You have never 
doubted ? ” 

“ Doubted? Was your honor not as my own? ” 

“ I can die at peace then ; you know me guiltless ” 

“ Great God ! Death shall not touch you. As I stand here 

not a hair of your head shall be harmed ” 

“ Hush ! Justice must take its course. One thing only — has 
she* heard ? ” 

“Nothing. She has left Africa. But you can be saved; you 
shall be saved ! They do not know what they do ! ” 

“Yes! They but follow the sentence of the law. Do not 
regret it. It is best thus.” 

“ Best ! — that you should be slaughtered in cold blood ! ” His 
voice was hoarse with the horror which, despite his words, pos- 
sessed him. He knew what the demands of discipline exacted, 
he knew what the inexorable tyranny of the army enforced, he 
knew that he had found the life lost to him for so long only to 
stand by and see it struck down like a shot stag’s. 

Cecil’s eyes looked at him with a regard in which all 
the sacrifice, all the patience, all the martyrdom of his life 
spoke. 

“ Best, because a lie I could never speak to you, and the 
truth I can never tell to you. Do not let her know; it might 
give her pain. I have loved her; that is useless, like all the 
rest. Give me your hand once more, and then — let them do 
their duty. Turn your head away ; it will soon be over ! ” 

Almost ere he asked it, his friend’s hands closed upon both 
his own, keeping the promise made so long before in the old 
years gone; great, tearless sobs heaved the depths of his broad 
chest; those gentle, weary words had rent his very soul, and 
he knew that he was powerless here; he knew that he could 
no more stay this doom of death than he could stay the rising 
of the sun up over the eastern heavens. The clear voice of the 
officer in command rang shrilly through the stillness. 

“ Monseigneur, make your farewell. I can wait no longer.” 


IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY. 


591 


The Seraph started, and flung himself round with the grand 
challenge of a lion, struck by a, puny spear. His face flushed 
crimson; his words were choked in his throbbing throat. 

“ As I live, you shall not fire ! I forbid you ! I swear by 
my honor and the honor of England that he shall not die like 
a dog. He is of my country; he is of my Order. I will appeal 
to your Emperor ; he will accord me his life the instant I ask it. 
Give me only an hour’s reprieve — a few moments’ space to 

speak to your chiefs, to seek out your general ” 

“ It is impossible, monseigneur.” 

The curt, calm answer was inflexible; against the sentence 
and its execution there could be no appeal. 

Cecil laid his hand upon his old friend’s shoulders. 

“ It will be useless,” he murmured. “ Let them act ; the 
quicker the better.” 

“ What ! you think I would look on and see you die ? ” 

“Would to Heaven you had never known I lived ” 

The officer made a gesture to the guard to separate them. 

“ Monsieur, submit to the execution of the law, or I must 
arrest you.” 

Lyonnesse flung off the detaining hand of the guard, and 
swung round so that his agonized eyes gazed close into the 
adjutant’s immovable face, which before that gaze lost its cold- 
ness and its rigor, and changed to a great pity for this stranger 
who had found the friend of his youth in the man who stood 
condemned to perish there. 

“ An hour’s reprieve ; for mercy’s sake, grant that ! ” 

“ I have said, it is impossible.” 

“ But you do not dream who is ” 

“ It matters not.” 

“ He is an English noble, I tell you ” 

“ He is a soldier who has broken the law ; that suffices.” 

“ O Heaven ! have you no humanity ? ” 

“We have justice.” 

“ Justice ! If you have justice, let your chiefs hear his story; 
let his name be made known; give me an hour’s space to plead 
for him. Your Emperor would grant me his life, were he here; 
yield me an hour — a half hour — anything that will give me 
time to serve him ” 

“ It is out of the question ; I must obey my orders. I regret 
you should have this pain; but if you do not cease to interfere, 
my soldiers must make you.” 


592 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


Where the guards held him, Cecil saw and heard. His voice 
rose with all its old strength and sweetness. 

“My friend, do not plead for me. For the sake of our com- 
mon country and our old love, let us both meet this with silence 
and with courage.” 

“ You are a madman ! ” cried the man, whose heart felt break- 
ing under this doom he could neither avert nor share. “ You 
think that they shall kill you before my eyes ? — you think I shall 
stand by to see you murdered? What crime have you done? 
Hone, I dare swear, save being moved, under insult, to act as 
the men of your race ever acted! Ah, God! why have lived 
as you have done ? why not have trusted my faith and my love ? 
If you had believed in my faith as I believed in your innocence, 
this misery never had come to us ! ” 

“ Hush ! hush ! or you will make me die like a coward.” 

He dreaded lest he should do so; this ordeal was greater than 
his power to bear it. With the mere sound of this man’s voice 
a longing, so intense in its despairing desire, came on him for 
this life which they were about to kill in him forever. 

The words stung his hearer well-nigh to madness; he turned 
on the soldiers with all the fury of his race that slumbered so 
long, but when it awoke was like the lion’s rage. Invective, 
entreaty, conjuration, command, imploring prayer, and ungov- 
erned passion poured in tumultuous words, in agonized elo- 
quence, from his lips ; all answer was a quick sign of the hand ; 
and, ere he saw them, a dozen soldiers were round him, his 
arms were seized, his splendid frame was held as powerless as 
a lassoed bull ; for a moment there was a horrible struggle, then 
a score of ruthless hands locked him in as in iron gyves, and 
forced his mouth to silence and his eyes to blindness. This was 
all the mercy they could give — to spare him the sight of his 
friend’s slaughter. 

Cecil’s eyes strained on him with one last, longing look ; then 
he raised his hand and gave the signal for his own death-shot. 

The leveled carbines covered him; he stood erect with his 
face full toward the sun. Ere they could fire, a shrill cry 
pierced the air. 

“Wait! in the name of France.” 

Dismounted, breathless, staggering, with her arms flung up- 
ward, and her face bloodless with fear, Cigarette appeared upon 
upon the ridge of rising ground. 

The cry of command pealed out upon the silence in the voices 


IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY. 


5 93 


that the Army of Africa loved as the voice of their Little One. 
And the cry came too late; the volley was fired, the crash of 
sound thrilled across the words that bade them pause, the heavy 
smoke rolled out upon the air; the death that was doomed was 
dealt. 

But beyond the smoke-cloud he staggered slightly, and then 
stood erect still, almost unharmed, grazed only by some few of 
the balls. The flash of fire was not so fleet as the swiftness of 
her lpve; and on his breast she threw herself, and flung her 
arms about him, and turned her head backward with her old, 
dauntless, sunlit smile as the balls pierced her bosom, and broke 
her limbs, and were turned away by that shield of warm young 
life from him. 

Her arms were gliding from about his neck, and her shot 
limbs were sinking to the earth as he caught her up where she 
dropped to his feet. 

“ O God ! my child ! they have killed you ! ” 

He suffered more, as the cry broke from him, than if the 
bullets had brought him that death which he saw at one glance 
had stricken down forever all the glory of her childhood, all 
the gladness of her youth. 

She laughed — all the clear, imperious, arch laughter of her 
sunniest hours unchanged. 

“ Chut ! It is the powder and ball of F ranee ! that does not 
hurt. If it was an Arbico’s bullet now! But wait! Here is 
the Marshal’s order. He suspends your sentence; I have told 
him all. You are safe! — do you hear? — you are safe! How he 
looks! Is he grieved to live? Mes Frangais! tell him clearer 
than I can tell — here is the order. The General must have it. 
No — not out of my hand till the General sees it. Fetch him, 
some of you — fetch him to me.” 

“ Great Heaven! You have given your life for mine! ” 

The words broke from him in an agony as he held her up- 
ward against his heart, himself so blind, so stunned, with the 
sudden recall from death to life, and with the sacrifice whereby 
life was thus brought to him, that he could scarce see her face, 
scarce hear her voice, but only dimly, incredulously, terribly 
knew, in some vague sense, that she was dying, and dying thus 
for him. 

She smiled up in his eyes, while even in that moment, when 
her life was broken down like a wounded bird’s, and the shots 
had pierced through from her shoulder to her bosom, a hot, 


5y4 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


scarlet flush came over her cheeks as she felt his touch, and 
rested on his heart. 

“ A life ! Tiens ! what is it to give? We hold it in our hands 
every hour, we soldiers, and toss it in change for a draught of 
wine. Lay me down on the ground — at your feet — so! I shall 
live longest that way, and I have much to tell. How they crowd 
around me ! Mes soldats, do not make that grief and that rage 
over me. They are sorry they fired ; that is foolish. They were 
only doing their duty, and they could not hear me in time.” 

But the brave words could not console those who had killed 
the Child of the Tricolor ; they flung their carbines away, they 
beat their breasts, they cursed themselves and the mother who 
had borne them; the silent, rigid, motionless phalanx that had 
stood there in the dawn to see death dealt in the inexorable 
penalty of the law was broken up into a tumultuous, breathless, 
heart-stricken, infuriated throng, maddened with remorse, con- 
vulsed with sorrow, turning wild eyes of hate on him as on the 
cause through which their darling had been stricken. He, lay- 
ing her down with unspeakable gentleness as she had bidden 
him, hung over her, leaning her head against his arm, and 
watching in paralyzed horror the helplessness of the quivering 
limbs, the slow flowing of the blood beneath the Cross that 
shone where that young heroic heart so soon would beat no 
more. 

“ Oh, my child, my child ! ” he moaned, as the full might and 
meaning of this devotion which had saved him at such cost 
rushed on him. “ What am I worth that you should perish for 
me? Better a thousand times have left me to my fate! Such 
nobility, such sacrifice, such love ! ” 

The hot color flushed her face once more; she was strong to 
the last to conceal that passion for which she was still content 
to perish in her youth. 

“ Chut ! We are comrades, and you are a brave man. I would 
do the same for any of my Spahis. Look you, I never heard 
of your arrest till I heard, too, of your sentence ” 

She paused a moment, and her features grew white and quiv- 
ered with pain and with the oppression that seemed to lie like 
lead upon her chest. But she forced herself to be stronger than 
the anguish which assailed her strength; and she motioned 
them all to be silent as she spoke on while her voice still should 
serve her. 

“ They will tell you how I did it — I have not time. 


The 


IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY. 


595 


Marshal gave his word you shall be saved; there is no fear. 
That is your friend who bends over me here? — is it not? A 
fair face, a brave face! You will go back to your land — you 
will live among your own people — and she, she will love you 
now — now she knows you are of her Order ! ” 

Something of the old thrill of jealous dread and hate quiv- 
ered through the words, but the purer, nobler nature van- 
quished it; she smiled up in his eyes, heedless of the tumult 
round them. 

“ You will be happy. That is well. Look you — it is nothing 
that I did. I would have done it for any one of my soldiers. 
And for this ” — she touched the blood flowing from her side 
with the old, bright, brave smile — “ it was an accident ; they 
must not grieve for it. My men are good to me; they will feel 
much regret and remorse; but do not let them. I am glad to 
die.” 

The words were unwavering and heroic; but for one moment 
a convulsion went over her face; the young life was so strong 
in her, the young spirit was so joyous in her, existence was so 
new, so fresh, so bright, so dauntless a thing to Cigarette. She 
loved life: the darkness, the loneliness, the annihilation of 
death were horrible to her as the blackness and the solitude 
of night to a young child. Death, like night, can be welcome 
only to the weary, and she was weary of nothing on the earth 
that bore her buoyant steps; the suns, the winds, the delights 
of the sights, the joys of the senses, the music of her own 
laughter, the mere pleasure of the air upon her cheeks, or of the 
blue sky above her head, were all so sweet to her. Her welcome 
of her death-shot was the only untruth that had ever soiled 
her fearless lips. Death was terrible; yet she was content — 
content to have come to it for his sake. 

There was a ghastly, stricken silence round her. The order 
she had brought had just been glanced at, but no other thought 
was with the most callous there than the heroism of her act, 
than the martyrdom of her death. 

The color was fast passing from her lips, and a mortal pallor 
settling there in the stead of that rich, bright hue, once warm 
as the scarlet heart of the pomegranate. Her head leaned back 
on Cecil’s breast, and she felt the great burning tears fall, one 
by one, upon her brow as he hung speechless over her; she put 
her hand upward and touched his eyes softly. 

“ Chut ! What is it to die — just to die? You have lived your 


596 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


martyrdom; I could not have done that. Listen, just one mo- 
ment. You will be rich. Take care of the old man — he will 
not trouble long — and of Vole-qui-veut and fitoile, and Boule 
Blanche, and the rat, and all the dogs, will you? They will 
show you the Chateau de Cigarette in Algiers. I should not 
like to think that they would starve.” 

She felt his lips move with the promise he could not find 
voice to utter; and she thanked him with that old child-like 
smile that had lost nothing of its light. 

“ That is good ; they will be happy with you. And see here 
— that Arab must have back his white horse; he alone saved 
you. Have heed that they spare him. And make my grave 
somewhere where my army passes ; where I can hear the 
trumpets, and the arms, and the passage of the troops — O God! 
I forgot ! I shall not wake when the bugles sound. It will all 
end now ; will it not ? That is horrible, horrible ! ” 

A shudder shook her as, for the moment, the full sense that 
all her glowing, redundant, sunlit, passionate life was crushed 
out forever from its place upon the earth forced itself on and 
overwhelmed her. But she was of too brave a mold to suffer 
any foe — even the foe that conquers kings — to have power to 
appall her. She raised herself, and looked at the soldiery 
around her, among them the men whose carbines had killed her, 
whose anguish was like the heart-rending anguish of women. 

“Mes Frangais! That was a foolish word of mine. How 
many of my bravest have fallen in death; and shall I be afraid 
of what they welcomed? Do not grieve like that. You could 
not help it; you were doing your duty. If the shots had not 
come to me, they would have gone to him ; and he has been 
unhappy so long, and borne wrong so patiently, he has earned 
the right to live and enjoy. How I — I have been happy all my 
days, like a bird, like a kitten, like a foal, just from being 
young and taking no thought. I should have had to suffer if 
I had lived. It is much best as it is ” 

Her voice failed her when she had spoken the heroic words; 
loss of blood was fast draining all strength from her, and she 
quivered in a torture she could not wholly conceal. He for 
whom she perished hung over her in an agony greater far than 
hers. It seemed a hideous dream to him that this child lay 
dying in his stead. 

“ Can nothing save her ? ” he cried aloud. “ O God ! that 
you had fired one moment sooner ! ” 


IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY. 


597 


She heard; and looked up at him with a look in which all 
the passionate, hopeless, imperishable love she had resisted 
and concealed so long spoke with an intensity she never 
dreamed. 

“ She is content,” she whispered softly. “ You did not under- 
stand her rightly; that was all.” 

“ All ! O God, how I have wronged you ! ” 

The full strength, and nobility, and devotion of this passion 
he had disbelieved in and neglected rushed on him as he met 
her eyes; for the first time he saw her as she was; for the first 
time he saw all of which the splendid heroism of this un- 
trained nature w’ould have been capable under a different fate. 
And it struck him suddenly, heavily, as with a blow; it filled 
him with a passion of remorse. 

“ My darling ! my darling ! what have I done to be worthy 
of such love ? ” he murmured, while the tears fell from his 
blinded eyes, and his head drooped until his lips met hers. At 
the first utterance of that word between them, at the uncon- 
scious tenderness of his kisses that had the anguish of a fare- 
well in them, the color suddenly flushed all over her blanched 
face; she trembled in his arms; and a great, shivering sigh ran 
through her. It came too late, this warmth of love. She 
learned what its sweetness might have been only when her lips 
grew numb, and her eyes sightless, and her heart without pulse, 
and her senses without consciousness. 

“Hush ! ” she answered, with a look that pierced his soul. 
“ Keep those kisses for Miladi. She will have the right to love 
you ; she is of your ( aristocrates,’ she is not 1 unsexed.’ As for 
me — I am only a little trooper who has saved my comrade! 
My. soldiers, come round me one instant; I shall not long find 
words.” 

Her eyes closed as she spoke; a deadly faintness and cold- 
ness passed over her; and she gasped for breath. A moment, 
and the resolute courage in her conquered; her eyes opened 
and rested on the war-worn faces of her “ children ” — rested 
in a long, last look of unspeakable wistfulness and tenderness. 

“ I cannot speak as I would,” she said at length, while her 
voice grew very faint. “ But I have loved you. All is said ! ” 

All was uttered in those four brief words. “ She had loved 
them.” The whole story of her young life was told in the single 
phrase. And the gaunt, battle-scarred, murderous, ruthless 
veterans of Africa who heard her could have turned their 


598 


UNDER TWO FLAGS. 


weapons against their own breasts, and sheathed them there, 
rather than have looked on to see their darling die. 

“ I have been too quick in anger sometimes — forgive it,” she 
said gently. “ And do not fight and curse among yourselves ; 
it is bad amid brethren. Bury my Cross with me, if they will 
let you ; and let the colors be over my grave, if you can. Think 
of me when you go into battle; and tell them in France ” 

For the first time her own eyes filled with great tears as the 
name of her beloved land paused upon her lips. She stretched 
her arms out with a gesture of infinite longing, like a lost child 
that vainly seeks its mother. 

“If I could only see France once more! France ” 

It was the last word upon her utterance ; her eyes met Cecil’s 
in one fleeting, upward glance of unutterable tenderness, then, 
with her hands still stretched out westward to where her coun- 
try was, and with the dauntless heroism of her smile upon her 
face like light, she gave a tired sigh as of a child that sinks to 
sleep, and in the midst of her Army of Africa the Little One 
lay dead. 

In the shadow of his tent, at midnight, he whom she had 
rescued stood looking down at a bowed, stricken form before 
him with an exceeding, yearning pity in his gaze. 

The words had at length been spoken that had lifted from 
him the burden of another’s guilt; the hour at last had come in; 
which his eyes had met the eyes of his friend, without a hidden 
thought between them. The sacrifice was ended, the martyrdom 
was over; henceforth this doom of exile and of wretchedness 
would be but as a hideous dream; henceforth his name would 
be stainless among men, and the desire of his heart would be 
given him. And in this hour of release the strongest feeling 
in him was the sadness of an infinite compassion; and where 
his brother was stretched prostrate in shame before him, Cecil 
stooped and raised him tenderly. 

“ Say no more,” he murmured. “ It has been well for me 
that I have suffered these things. For yourself — if you do in- 
deed repent, and feel that you owe me any debt, atone for it, and 
pay it, by letting your own life be strong in truth and fair in 
honor.” 

And it seemed to him that he himself had done no great or 
righteous thing in that servitude for another’s sake, whose yoke 
was now lifted off him for evermore. But, looking out over 


IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY. 


599 


the sleeping camp where one young child alone lay in a slum- 
ber that never would be broken, his heart ached with the sense 
of some great, priceless gift received, and undeserved, and cast 
aside; even while in the dreams of passion that now knew its 
fruition possible, and the sweetness of communion with the 
friend whose faith had never forsaken him, he retraced the 
years of his exile, and thanked God that it was thus with him 
at the end. 


3 


> 


CHAPTER THE LAST. 

AT REST. 

Under the green, springtide leafage of English woodlands, 
made musical with the movement and the song of innumerable 
birds that had their nests among the hawthorn boughs and deep, 
cool foliage of elm and beech, an old horse stood at pasture. 
Sleeping — with the sun on his gray, silken skin, and the flies 
driven off with a dreamy switch of his tail, and the grasses 
odorous about his hoofs, with dog-violets, and cowslips, and wild 
thyme — sleeping, yet not so surely but at one voice he started, 
and raised his head with all the eager grace of his youth, and 
gave a murmuring noise of welcome and delight. He had 
known that voice in an instant, though for so many years his 
ear had never thrilled to it; Forest King had never forgotten. 
How, scarce a day passed but what it spoke to him some word 
of greeting or of affection, and his black, soft eyes would gleam 
with their old fire, because its tone brought back a thousand 
memories of bygone victory — only memories now, when Forest 
King, in the years of age, dreamed out his happy life under the 
fragrant shade of the forest wealth of Royallieu. 

With his arm over the horse’s neck, the exile, who had re- 
turned to his birthright, stood silent a while, gazing out over 
the land on which his eyes never wearied of resting; the glad, 
cool, green, dew-freshened earth that was so sweet and full of 
peace, after the scorched and blood-stained plains, whose sun 
was as flame, and whose breath was as pestilence. Then his 
glance came back and dwelt upon the face beside him, the proud 
and splendid woman’s face that had learned its softness and its 
passion from him alone. 

“ It was worth banishment to return,” he murmured to her. 
“It was worth the trials that I bore to learn the love that I 
have known ” 

She, looking upward at him with those deep, lustrous, im- 
perial eyes that had first met his own in the glare of the African 
noon, passed her hand over his lips with a gesture of tender- 

600 





AT REST. 601 

ness far more eloquent from her than from women less proud 
and less prone to weakness. 

“ Ah, hush ! when I think of what her love was, how worth- 
less looks my own ! how little worthy of the fate it finds ! What 

have I done thjit every joy should become mine, when she ” 

Her mouth trembled, and the phrase died unfinished; strong 
as her own love had grown, it looked to her unproven and with- 
out desert, beside that which had chosen to perish for his sake. 
And where they stood with the future as fair before them as 
the light of the day around them, he bowed his head, as before 
some sacred thing, at the whisper of the child who had died 
for him. The memories of both went back to £ place in a 
desert land where the folds of the Tricolor drooped over one 
little grave turned westward toward the shores of France — a 
grave made where the beat of drum, and the sound of moving 
squadrons, and the ring of the trumpet-call, and the noise of 
the assembling battalions could be heard by night and day; 
a grave where 4 the troops, as they passed it by, saluted and low- 
ered their arms in tender reverence, in faithful, unasked 
homage, because beneath the Flag they honored there was 
carved in the white stone one name that spoke to every heart 
within the army she had loved, one name on which the Arab 
‘'sun streamed as with a martyr’s glory; 

“ CIGAKETTE, 

“ENFANT DE L’ARMEE, SOLD AT DE LA FRANCE. '* 


THE END. 














































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